Edward O. Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1929. He received his B.S. and M.S. in biology from the University of Alabama and, in 1955, his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, where he taught for four decades, receiving both of its college-wide teaching awards. He is currently University Research Professor Emeritus at Harvard, and Honorary Curator in Entomology of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He is the recipient of more than 100 international medals and awards, including the...

Douglas C. Wallace has been a pioneer in the study of human mitochondrial genetics and the role of mitochondrial DNA variation in human evolution, disease, cancer, and aging. In the 1970s Dr. Wallace defined the basic principles of human mitochondrial DNA genetics, demonstrating that the human mitochondrial DNA encodes heritable traits, is maternally transmitted, has a high mutation rate, that intracellular mixtures on mutant and normal mitochondrial DNA are common and can segregate randomly...

Paul Turner received his Ph.D. in 1995 from the Center for Microbial Ecology, at Michigan State University. He did postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health, University of Valencia in Spain, and University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Turner is currently Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and a faculty member in the Microbiology Program at Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Turner currently serves as an Associate Editor for the journal...

Bruce Stillman is President of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on the north shore of Long Island in New York. A native of Australia, he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree with honors at Sydney University and a Ph. D. at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University. He then moved to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 1979 and has been at the Laboratory ever since, being promoted to the scientific staff in 1981. Dr. Stillman has been...

Lucy Shapiro holds the Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Chair in the Department of Developmental Biology and is the Director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She joined the faculty at the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1989 and served as the founding Chairman of the Department of Developmental Biology from 1989-1997. Prior to coming to Stanford,...

Venki Ramakrishnan grew up in India and moved to the U.S.A. in 1971. After initially being trained as a physicist at Ohio University, he switched to biology in 1976 at the University of California, San Diego. His interest in ribosomes dates back to 1978 when he joined Peter Moore’s laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. He began his independent career at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1983. In 1995 he moved to the University of Utah to become a professor of...

David Page studies the genetic and developmental foundations of human reproduction, including genetic differences between males and females. His laboratory conducts DNA sequence-based explorations of human and other vertebrate sex chromosomes, with particular attention to the male-specific Y chromosome and its roles in sperm production and male infertility. The Page laboratory is also elucidating how sex cells – the precursors of eggs and sperm – arise and develop in mammalian embryos...

Rob Martienssen is a Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Dr. Martienssen obtained his PhD at the Plant Breeding Institute, Cambridge University. He received postdoctoral training at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the faculty at Cold Spring Harbor in 1989. Research in Dr. Martienssen's laboratory focuses on epigenetic mechanisms that shape and regulate the genome, and their impact on development and inheritance. His work on transposable elements in plants and...

Susan Lindquist is a member, and former Director, of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, where she guided it through the formation of the neighboring Broad Institute. She is also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She received her PhD in Biology from Harvard in 1976 and was a postdoctoral fellow of the American Cancer Society. She was named the Albert D. Lasker Professor of Medical...

Nicole King is reconstructing a seminal event in evolution – the transition to multicellularity that set the stage for animal origins. The King lab focuses on choanoflagellates, the closest known relatives of animals, and sponges, the earliest branching animal phylum. Using comparative genomics in choanoflagellates and sponges, this work has revealed that diverse gene families required for animal cell interactions evolved before the origin of animal multicelluarity. Current research in the...