Dr. Stephen Floor is an assistant professor at the University of California in San Francisco. He did his college education in Kansas where he majored in physics and computer science and then got a Ph.D. in Biophysics from UCSF. He did my postdoc with Jennifer Doudna at UC Berkeley and came back just two years ago to start his own group at UCSF. Dr. Stephen Floor's lab studies how genes are expressed and decisions are made to turn on or turn off a gene, mostly in mammalian cells. There is a lot of work that is focused on control of the transcriptional step, his group is really the most interested in how genes are regulated after RNAs are produced from a gene and how different are the molecules from the same gene might have different functions. His group studies this both in normal cells and in cells that have genetic mutations, they could rise to diseases like cancer.