Richard Harland is the C. H. Li Distinguished Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley where his lab studies early vertebrate development in both Xenopus and in mice. As a PhD student, Harland studied DNA replication in the lab of Dr. Ron Laskey at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. He moved to the USA, and began his studies of vertebrate development, as a post-doc with Harold Weintraub at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. In 1985, Harland joined the faculty at UC Berkeley.
As well as running a successful research lab, Harland is an integral member of the developmental biology community. He has played an important role in the project to sequence the Xenopus tropicalis and X. laevis genomes. He has taught in the Marine Biological Lab Embryology course for over 15 years and he co-authored the textbook “Early Development of Xenopus laevis: A Laboratory Manual”. His contributions to science and teaching have been recognized with the award of the E.G. Conklin Medal from the Society for Developmental Biology and election to the National Academy of Sciences.
Learn more about Harland’s lab here.
