Gary Karpen PhD

Gary started his scientific career in 1978 as a research technician in the Schubiger lab at the University of Washington, where he worked on imaginal disc formation in Drosophila. He obtained his PhD in the lab of Charles Laird at the University of Washington, where he worked on the role of nucleolus organization in rDNA function. He finished his PhD in Genetics in 1987 and continued to work with Drosophila during his postdoc in the lab of Allan Spradling at the Carnegie Institute.
His work in the Spradling lab spurred his interest in heterochromatin formation and 4 years later he started his own lab at The Salk Institute, La Jolla in 1991. After being in San Diego for 12 years, during which he obtained his professorship at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Gary and his lab moved to the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) in 2003. Gary has been an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley since 2003 and became director of the LBNL Life Sciences Division in 2011.