He completed his MD (1990) at Queen’s University before going to McGill for his residency where he trained in Internal Medicine, Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology, while concurrently completing an MSc in Epidemiology and Biostatistics. He subsequently undertook post-doctoral fellowship training in molecular epidemiology and microbial genomics at Stanford University, with Dr. Peter Small, before returning to McGill to start his own research group in 1999. Dr. Behr held a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator Award and a Chercheur-Boursier Senior award from the Fonds de la Recherche en Santé du Québec. Dr. Behr's research is on mycobacterial diseases, focusing on the genomic basis of bacterial pathogenicity, with a long-standing interest in the BCG vaccine family.