Nathalie Campo received her PhD from the university Paul Sabatier (Toulouse, France) in 2001 under the supervision of Paul Ritzenthaler and Pascal Le Bourgeois, studying chromosomal constraints that preserve bacterial genome organization.

She then joined the lab of Oscar Kuipers at the Groningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute in the Netherlands, where she was one of the first to investigate the subcellular localization of secretion systems in bacteria. In 2003, she moved to Boston in the US to pursue her postdoctoral research in the lab of David Rudner at the Harvard Medical School. Combining genetic, biochemical and cytological approaches, her work provided the first example of a branched signaling pathway governing regulated intramembrane proteolysis to control the activation of a sigma‐factor during sporulation in Bacillus subtilis. In 2008, she obtained a CNRS position at the Laboratoire de Microbiologie et Génétique Moléculaires (Toulouse, France) in the ‘Pneumococcal Competence and Transformation’ group headed by Jean-Pierre Claverys and Patrice Polard. Over the last 15 years, she has developed multidisciplinary approaches including the use of far-end imaging techniques at different levels of resolution to visualize and characterize the entire transformation process in Streptococcus pneumoniae, from the onset of competence induction to the phenotypic expression of transformants. Her findings indicate that competent pneumococcal cells undergo a transient cell division arrest, and evidence suggest that this delay contributes to stress tolerance in competent cells and preservation of genomic integrity during transformation.