Kenneth Stedman is Professor of Biology, co-founder of the Portland State University’s Center for Life in Extreme Environments and co-founder of StoneStable, Inc. Stedman began his scientific career with a degree in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University, USA, after which he moved to Switzerland to work in biotechnology. Stedman returned to the USA to obtain his PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology at University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Sydney Kustu, where he worked on the regulation of bacterial transcription. Obtaining a Marie-Curie and NSF postdoctoral fellowships, he worked with Wolfram Zillig, the pioneer of archaeal transcription and archaeal viruses, at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. It was here that Stedman developed his love of ‘extreme viruses’. He is currently Chair of the NASA virus focus group and CSO of StoneStable, Inc. a startup company developing technology for vaccine stabilization.