What was exciting? It was exciting to have this culture that was reverting and to discover it had the master sex determination switch gene which launched my career essentially.

Well, it took a while. It took a while to figure out. And as soon as we figured out, a graduate student figured out, great graduate students at MIT, I had a great lab. I was exhilarated, I was ecstatic beyond description because I knew this was the ticket to be able to do all the genetic analysis I wanted to do, because what I wanted to understand was how the worm counted to two, how did the worm know there were two X chromosomes? How did the worm know that there were two X chromosomes instead of one? And once we had zol-1, and that was the first gene of the pathway, I knew I would be able to figure out the genes that controlled it to figure out how the X chromosome was counted relative to the autosomes. So, I was ecstatic.

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.