Dr. Robert Lessick is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Life Sciences. After finishing at MIT, he took a position in the lab of Dr. Victor Ambros, then at Harvard University, where he studied on the developmental genetics of the roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans. A discovery made in that lab a few years later opened the door to the discovery of RNA interference. Craig Mello, a graduate student in that lab, eventually won a Nobel Prize for that discovery. After leaving Harvard, Bob enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins where he studied protein stability in hyperthermophilic organisms with both Nobel laureate Christian Anfinsen, and later with Evangelos Moudrianakis, the 2009 recipient of the Bodossaki Aristeio, or the “Greek Nobel Prize.” After Hopkins, he worked for Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, where he helped maintain scientific literature databases in microbiology and virology. Since 2001, he has been teaching in the Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences in both the Master of Science in Biotechnology and Master of Science in Bioinformatics programs. He left CSA in 2004 to accept a full-time position at Hopkins. Dr. Lessick has been teaching full time with the Johns Hopkins Center for Biotechnology Education since January 2004 and has been teaching courses in molecular biology, biostatistics, bioinformatics and genomics at Johns Hopkins dating back to 2001.