David Bartel received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993 and has since headed a lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, where he is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Professor of Biology at MIT.  His lab initially studied the ability of RNA to catalyze reactions and more recently has focused on microRNAs and other regulatory RNAs.  Over the past 15 years his lab has contributed to the understanding of the genomics, biogenesis and regulatory targets of these RNAs, as well as the molecular and biological consequences of their actions in animals, plants and fungi.