Named for Elizabeth O. King, a bacteriologist at the US Centers for Disease Control who studied meningitis in infants, Elizabethkingia meningoseptica is a gram-negative, obligate aerobic bacterium in the family Flavobacteriaceae (Figure). King named the bacterium Flavobacterium (from the Latin flavus, “yellow”) meningosepticum, and in 1994 it was reclassified in the genus Chryseobacterium (from the Greek chryseos, “golden”). In 2005, it was placed in the new genus Elizabethkingia.