When Sean Crosson was a child growing up in rural Texas, he learned about vaccinating cattle against Bang’s disease from his high school agriculture teacher. The disease’s name amused him at the time. 

Now, Crosson, a Professor Rudolph Hugh Endowed Chair in Michigan State University’s Department of Microbiology, Genetics and Immunology, has been awarded a $2.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study the cause of that very disease, Brucella abortus.