Around six years ago, microbiologist Lisa Hensley was scheduled to give a guest lecture in Manhattan, Kansas. The so-called Little Apple. Located in the state’s Flint Hills, the area used to be home to large herds of bison. Now, it’s home to lots of domesticated livestock.

It also hosts Kansas State University, where Hensley — who has studied some of the world’s scariest diseases — was going to speak. At the time, Hensley was part of the leadership at the National Institutes of Health. While she was visiting campus, she heard about a new, gigantic high-security lab called the National Bio and Agro-defense Facility, or NBAF for short, that was going to be built adjacent to K-State. There, scientists working for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) would study very contagious, and often fatal, diseases that affect animals and humans.

Around that time, construction on the 48-acre, 1.25-billion-dollar campus was just beginning. “I saw the pictures of the facilities and I was like, ‘Oh, that would be a really cool place to work,’” Hensley said.

Years later, a colleague called her with what sounded like a perfect opportunity: NBAF, whose construction finished earlier this year, was looking for someone to head up its Zoonotic and Emerging Disease Research Unit. That group would study existing high-consequence (read: dangerous) diseases that spread between humans and animals and those that are just beginning to rear their germy heads into existence or prominence on this planet. Scientists across NBAF would study foot-and-mouth disease, classical and African swine fevers, Rift Valley fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, Japanese encephalitis and Nipah virus. These diseases affect animals like cattle, pigs, birds, bats, snakes and frogs, and also Homo sapiens.