I got a job at Princeton and Harvard was interested in hiring [my husband, Tom Cline], but we decided to come back to Berkeley, because I'm from California. At that point, my father had had a heart attack and I thought it'd be a good idea to be close to my parents, but I never wanted to leave MIT. I loved MIT. I loved the people, I loved the scientific rigor, I loved the honesty, I loved the fact they were just so into science.

And it was a much more intellectual place in a way than Harvard because people were really into science and they weren't, of course, they had their own arrogance, but they really love science and I really love that. And I am a very intense person and I felt really comfortable there, much more comfortable on the East Coast than I ever did on the West Coast. So, I was scared to come back to Berkeley, but I did. And also, I was really grateful that Bob Horvitz, one of the attractions of MIT was Bob Horvitz, who was a very famous nematode person. And that was great. It was extremely helpful to have him in the lab next door to me. But it was also intimidating the sense that he was a high standard to be held against. And so, in the end, it worked out well to come to Berkeley. I had my own independence. I had the projects I really wanted to work on. I knew I was going to be successful because I already had the master sex determination switch gene and I was able to colonize a lab in Berkeley and with my husband who had his own lab at Berkeley.

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.