Barbara Wold

Professor Wold is Bren Professor of Molecular Biology and served as the inaugural Director of the Merkin Institute from 2019 to 2023. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023, professor Wold is a genome scientist whose research is focused on the discovery of how gene activity is encoded in the DNA and the development of the technologies needed to figure that out. She and her research group use genomics to understand the basis of cell identity, how it is disrupted in disease, and how it can be engineered. Her group is also active in building international functional genomics databases and computational resources.