Bassem Al-Sady, PhD

I grew up in Nuernberg, Germany and then pursued my undergraduate studies in the UK. I became fascinated by the mechanisms plants use to sense their environment, and pursued a PhD in Plant Biology at Berkeley, to learn how plants rapidly translate a light signal into large scale transcriptional changes. This got me interested in nuclear events and specifically, how chromatin can adopt different states to allow or prevent transcription at a given site over multiple generations. A great case study of this is heterochromatin, a nucleic-acid protein composite that can silence large stretches of the chromosome over many generations, a structure that is the focus of study in the lab (al-sadylab.ucsf.edu). I love seeing jazz, sailing and cooking.