I did a postdoc first, after my Ph.D. I went to Berkeley. And, actually, it was the second time I'd gone to the US. I'd been an undergraduate at UCSF, a summer undergraduate, and that was quite fun, too. That was my first real experience in molecular biology. Then for my postdoc I worked on maize genetics, and actually that was the first time I worked on maize. I'd worked on wheat before. That was really exciting, when I first really learned how to apply the theory of genetics to a real organism, that you could do real genetic experiments with. That was very exciting, and transposable elements were really a key part of that. Actually I'd been working with transposable elements since my summer in San Francisco. Remarkably! And for my Ph.D., I worked on transposons in wheat and then in Berkeley I worked on "Mutator" transposons, which are a very active form of transposable element found in maize. So I came to Cold Spring Harbor in 1989 to continue work on that and also to follow up some other research that I'd started at Berkeley. I've been here ever since. [I’ve] gradually built a group studying genetics in both maize and Arabidopsis, now. Arabidopsis being the primo model plant these days.

Dr. Robert Martiennsen is a plant biologist, Howard Hughes Medical Institute-Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation investigator, and professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Martiennsen attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, completing his BA in 1982 and continuing on to his PhD in 1986 on the molecular genetics of alpha-amylase gene families in common wheat. He received an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship with University of California, Berkeley. In 1989, he was hired as a principal investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. As a young scientist, he worked closely with Barbara McClintock. His awards and honors include the Newcomb Cleveland Prize, McClintock Prize, and Science’s Breakthrough of the Year in 2002 and the Kumho International Science Award in Plant Biology and Biotechnology (2001).