My mother's parents, my grandparents, came from Italy. They were peasants in Italy and they were farmers. They came to California. My grandfather brought all of his seeds from his farm and my grandfather established, bought a ranch, a farm in California in the Central Valley. He was about 35 when he came over and my grandmother came over independently. They didn't know each other. She was 18 and they were introduced through friends and they got married and my grandfather started with his 30 acres of ranch. He started growing peppers and fig trees and peach trees, apricot trees. My mother was born to this farm area. She was the oldest child, a woman, a girl in an Italian family wasn't so honored. Her brother, the second child, because he was a boy was honored and he was allowed to have all sorts of privileges like going to college. My mother was raised speaking only Italian. She went to first grade and she couldn't speak English, so she had to repeat first grade and learn English so that she could continue her education. For that reason, she decided she would not teach me Italian because she was afraid I would not speak English. But she swore because her brother had privilege that her daughter was going to go to college, her daughter was going to go to any college she wanted to, and she supported me her entire life that way.

Dr. Barbara Meyer is a genetics, genomics and development professor in the molecular and cell biology department at University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as an adjunct professor in the biochemistry and biophysics department at University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine and an HHMI investigator. Dr. Meyer completed her undergraduate studies at Stanford University and began her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and finished at Harvard University. During her post-doctoral work, she researched how chromosomes determined sex of C. elegans at the Cambridge University Laboratory of Molecular Biology with Dr. Sydney Brenner.

Dr. Meyer received her Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Stanford University in 1971, her Master of Science in Molecular Biology from the University of California-Berkeley in 1975, and her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University in 1979. She then began post-doctoral research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology to research how chromosomes determined sex of C. elegans. After completing her work at the MRC, she established her first lab at MIT to further analyze sex determination mechanisms.

Dr. Meyer was a tenured professor at MIT until 1990 where she became a genetics, genomics, and development professor at the University of California-Berkeley. In 1995, she became a member of the American Association of Cell Biology and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also became an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1997, where she and her lab successfully identified the master gene involved in sex determination. This breakthrough has helped advance research on chromosome repression and X chromosome dosage compensation.

Dr. Meyer has received many awards for her work, including the Genetics Society of America Medal in 2010, the Francis Amory Prize in Medicine and Physiology by the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2017, the E.B. Wilson Medal by the American Society for Cell Biology’s highest honor for science, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal, and was also elected to the National Academy of Medicine all in 2018.