[My NIH funding] started once I was at MIT. I was funded by a postdoc fellowship before that. And then when that ran out, Sydney supported me on funds from the MRC. But because I was trying to tackle this new project, it was very difficult and it took me a long time to be able to get results that were meaningful.

No, I was working on this project when I was a postdoc.

I moved the project to MIT, because Sydney Brenner always let you design your own experiments and take them with you. And so, I moved the project to MIT, and it took a while to be able to publish this story, but I was able to show there was dosage compensation in the worm. I was able to show that the likely mechanism was that both X chromosomes of hermaphrodites’ expression would be turned down by half to equal the expression in the male. And I was able to find, looking for sex-specific lethal mutations, I was able to find genes that were involved in dosage compensation. And so that took a while, that took a while at MIT. It was scary how long it would take to actually publish this.

I was in MIT for eight years.

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.