Judy A. Mikovits earned BA in Chemistry from University of Virginia in 1980 and a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from George Washington University in 1992. Her PhD thesis defense changed the paradigm for therapeutic treatment of HIV. For this work, she was awarded the graduate student of the year in 1991. In her thirty-five-year quest to understand and treat chronic diseases, she has co-authored seminal papers culminating at least a decade of research in each of four fields: immunology, natural products chemistry, epigenetics, and HIV/AIDs drug development. In 1999, when she directed the Laboratory of Antiviral Drug Mechanisms in developing therapeutics and diagnostics for HIV/AIDS and AIDS associated malignancies. These are therapies that are still standard of care twenty-five years later and credited with saving millions of deaths from HIV/AIDS. In 2006, she became attracted to the plight of families with neuro-immune diseases including ME/CFS and Autism, and she has been primarily responsible for demonstrating the relationship between environmentally acquired immune dysfunction, chronic inflammation and these diseases. In 2014 she and Kent Heckenlively co-authored the book Plague.