Paul Sternberg Named Chair of the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering

Paul Sternberg, Bren Professor of Biology, has been selected as the new chair of Caltech's Division of Biology and Biological Engineering (BBE). On September 1, he will begin a five-year term, taking over the William K. Bowes Jr. Leadership Chair from current division chair Richard Murray (BS '85), the Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems and Bioengineering.

"Paul is a distinguished biologist who has served Caltech for more than 35 years," says Caltech provost David Tirrell, the Carl and Shirley Larson Provostial Chair, and the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. "He is widely respected in the biological sciences community, as illustrated by his 2009 election to the National Academy of Sciences and his receipt of the 2024 Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal of the Genetics Society of America, an honor he shares with Caltech Nobel Laureates Ed Lewis and George Beadle. I'm delighted that he has agreed to succeed Richard Murray, whose extraordinary commitment to the Institute is reflected in his service as chair of two of our divisions—BBE from 2020 until 2024 and Engineering and Applied Science from 2000 until 2005."

Throughout his career, Sternberg's research has utilized the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, a small roundworm, to make advances in genetics, developmental biology, evolution, neuroscience, and disease research. Through C. elegans, he and his team aim to understand the mechanisms governing how a genome controls development, behavior, and physiology.

Sternberg has taken a leading role in developing information resources for C. elegans such as WormBase, the Alliance of Genome Resources, and the Gene Ontology Consortium. Additionally, he has co-founded microPublication Biology, a short-format, peer-reviewed journal that seeks to make scholarly communication effective and compatible with knowledge bases. 

"I love being at Caltech because of the many wonderful colleagues in our division, across campus, and at JPL," Sternberg says. "Our connectedness, intellectual resources, and technological capabilities position us to take on many of the challenges of this century, many of which involve biology. I look forward to helping keep Caltech the best place in the world to do science and to learn how to be a superb biological engineer or biologist."

Sternberg joined the Caltech faculty in 1987. He is an affiliated faculty member with the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech.