Samuel H. Sternberg

Samuel H. Sternberg, PhD, runs a research laboratory at Columbia University, where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. He received his BA in Biochemistry from Columbia University in 2007, graduating summa cum laude, and his PhD in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2014.

He earned graduate student fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense, and received the Scaringe Award and the Harold Weintraub Graduate Student Award. Sam’s research focuses on the mechanism of DNA targeting by RNA-guided bacterial immune systems (CRISPR-Cas) and on the development of these systems for genome engineering. In addition to publishing his work in leading scientific journals, he recently coauthored a popular science trade book together with Jennifer Doudna, entitled A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution, about the discovery, development, and applications of CRISPR gene-editing technology.