Gary Karpen received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1987 and performed postdoctoral work with Allan Spradling at the Carnegie Institute. He was a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences from 1991 to 2003 before moving to the University of California, Berkeley, and the Berkeley Laboratory.

Karpen is a Pew Biomedical Scholar, the author of more than 90 papers, book chapters and review articles and the holder of five patents. He served as the director of the Berkeley Laboratory’s Life Sciences division from 2011 to 2015. The Karpen lab’s current research continues a long-standing interest in chromosome structure and function, with a special emphasis on how biophysical and epigenetic mechanisms impact chromosome inheritance, nuclear architecture, genome stability and human health.