Jorge E. Galán was born in Pellegrini, a small town near Buenos Aires in Argentina. His father was a businessman, dealing with agriculture, his mother a homemaker. He had one older sister and one younger. While he still lived at home, he attended political and business meetings with his father and became very interested in politics. When Galán was 12, he was sent to a Salecian boarding school in Santa Rosa. After high school he decided to attend the University of La Plata, where he received his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and his Doctor of Veterinary Science. He became interested in infectious diseases, particularly in horses, and was accepted to the PhD program at the veterinary school at Cornell University. There he discovered his major interest, the clever Salmonella bug. He worked for several years in Roy Curtiss' lab at Washington University in St. Louis before he started his own lab at SUNY Stony Brook. There he discovered Type III protein secretion system; and he continued to study Salmonella. He continues to work most hours of every day in his lab, to teach, and to mentor his graduate students and postdoctoral students.