Rob Martienssen received his undergraduate and graduate training in Genetics at Cambridge University, and joined the faculty at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1989 following postdoctoral studies at the University of California at Berkeley. His research focuses on epigenetic mechanisms that shape and regulate the genome, and their impact on development and inheritance. He works on transposable elements, and other repeats and has shown that small RNA guide histone modification and chromosome segregation in fission yeast, as well as chromosome dosage and transposon control in the plant germline. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Fellow of the Royal Society and Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.