Steve Henikoff received a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry and molecular biology at Harvard University in the laboratory of Matthew Meselson, and did postdoctoral research with Charles Laird at the University of Washington. He is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a Member of the Basic Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Affiliate Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. In 2005 he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. His laboratory studies histone variants, epigenetic inheritance and centromere evolution, and develops tools for sequence comparison, in vivo mapping and functional genomics.