Paul Sternberg graduated from Hampshire College in 1978 and joined the Biology Department at MIT for his Ph.D., which he received in 1984. His graduate work on the Genetic Control of Nematode Development was under the supervision of H. Robert Horvitz. He then pursued postdoctoral research on yeast mating type with Ira Herskowitz at UCSF, and returned to C. elegans when he joined the Caltech Biology Division faculty in 1987, where he is now Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Biology. He is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, with whom he joined in 1989. He became lead-PI of WormBase in 1999 and started the Caltech branch of WormBase. He served on the board of directors of the Genetics Society of America from 2000-2003. At Caltech, he led the Biology graduate program for several years, helped found the BioEngineering graduate option, and is now director of the Center for Biological Circuit Design, part of the new Information Science and Technology initiative.