A Canadian Bacteriologist Gets a Genus Named in Her Honour, Her Second Bacterial Tribute

Kathryn Bernard, a University of Windsor science graduate (BSc '76), now has a genus of bacteria carrying her name. In 2026, a group of Canadian scientists called it Bernardella, in recognition of her career as a bacteriologist. The first species described within it is Bernardella vulneris.

The species was identified through the study of 11 bacterial strains, most of them recovered from human wounds. They were collected over an eight-year period and could not be matched to anything in the existing scientific literature. Bernard notes that a new genus and species today is often named from a single strain. Eleven strains that were unidentifiable but identical to one another, spread across eight years, is what she calls an interesting piece of this story. The researchers were largely based at her former laboratory in Winnipeg, and they chose to honour her by naming the genus after her.

Bernard says this makes her the first Canadian woman to have both a bacterial genus and a species named for her. It is also the second time she has been honoured this way. In 1995, a species now known as Trueperella bernardiae was named after her. It can cause abscesses and other infections in humans and, more rarely, disease in animals. She was in her 30s then. She describes it as a shock and a thrill, and says colleagues in labs across the country sometimes sent her strains of it for identification just for fun.

Her pride is mixed with something sharper. She says it is wrong and appalling that so few women have been honoured by the microbiology community, and calls the moment bittersweet. Research published in 2023 found that only a tiny proportion of bacterial genera named after people honoured women. Bernard has tried to push against that herself. She says her team has named at least half a dozen new bacterial genera or species after women, beginning with those who were not properly recognized in their own era. One example is Rosalind Franklin, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, for whom the group named a genus.

The path to her own naming ran through 41 years of work on the hardest cases. When a rare or unusual bacterial pathogen turned up in Canada and could not be identified, it often ended up in her lab. A system had been set up so that an organism that could not be identified to genus and species could be sent to her for further work, because many labs lacked the time or know-how to characterize rare pathogens fully. She and her colleagues characterized these organisms and often formally described the ones that proved new to science at the federal National Microbiology Laboratory, which moved from Ottawa to Winnipeg in 1998. Bernard says unidentifiable organisms turned up quite frequently. Naming one, she explains, can take the better part of a year, since researchers must establish how it differs from known species. A working name is needed before the paper can even begin.

The Winnipeg move also changed the nature of her work. Her lab had the specialized containment facilities needed to study highly dangerous pathogens, and from 1998 to 2005 it was in charge of studying organisms such as anthrax, whether naturally occurring or tied to possible bioterrorist events. In October 2001, after anthrax was found to have been spread in powdered form by mail in the United States, her lab became the focus of the national response to look for powdered anthrax in Canada. She says the team worked closely with federal, provincial and municipal emergency response communities.

Bernard also published scientific papers, wrote textbook chapters and presented at major conferences, including those of the American Society for Microbiology. In 2022, the Anaerobe Society of the Americas gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in Seattle. She retired five years ago but remains semi-active, reviewing papers for scientific journals and giving the occasional lecture at the University of Manitoba. Of the new genus, she says it is an honour in perpetuity, and that she is quite proud of it.