James B. Bliska was born in Grand Junction, Colorado, in 1959, the youngest of four children. His father was an architect originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan who died when James was only five years old. His mother was an elementary school teacher from Minnesota. His family moved throughout the United States several times during his youth, a lifestyle that provided several challenges for Bliska. It was, however, the yearly summer trips to his family’s lake house that sparked his interest in biology; and with the positive influence of his high-school biology teacher, Bliska was able to focus his interests.

Bliska attended Western State College of Colorado for one year and then transferred to the University of Wisconsin. It was not until his employment as a dishwasher in Oliver Smithies’ genetics lab that Bliska began to try his hand at research. Eventually he was performing the majority of the lab procedures and became published. This experience led him to develop a great interest in academic research and to switch his declared major from biology to bacteriology. Bliska applied to several PhD programs, and upon receiving his B.S. in Bacteriology in 1983, he matriculated into the University of California, Berkeley’s Molecular Biology PhD program, where he worked in Nicholas R. Cozzarelli’s Lab researching DNA topology during site-specific recombination reactions. He then collaborated with a lab at the University of California, San Francisco studying drug resistance in trypanosomes. This research led him down the path of infectious disease, one that would shape his career.

After receiving his doctorate in 1988, Bliska began his postdoc research in Stanley Falkow’s lab at Stanford University, where he attempted to purify a biologically active form of a Yersinia surface membrane protein. He then switched his focus to Yops (Yersinia outer membrane proteins) in a collaborative effort with Jack E. Dixon. He met his wife, Janice Valmassoi, in Dixon’s lab at Stanford.

In 1993 Bliska accepted a post as a principal investigator in the microbiology department of the State University of New York, Stony Brook and in 1999 received academic tenure as an associate professor. Since his arrival at SUNY Stony Brook his researched has focused primarily on Yops as bacterial toxins and the type-III secretion systems used by Yersinia to deliver them into host cells. He studies these bacterial-host cell interactions in hopes of explaining a widely conserved method of toxin delivery that has widespread medical applications.

Throughout his oral history Bliska emphasizes the importance of balancing personal and academic responsibilities. Bliska has received several grants, including a postdoc and a Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences grant, which he discusses in the oral history interview. He has published many articles on a variety of subjects in his young career.