David Drubin has served on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley for 27 years. His research combines live cell imaging, molecular and cell biology, genetics and biochemistry. The primary focuses of his research are the cytoskeleton and membrane trafficking events. He studies these processes in budding yeast and mammalian cells. In recent years he has begun to use genome-edited human stem cells for investigations of how the cytoskeleton and membrane trafficking events are altered during differentiation to serve the specific biological demands of the differentiated cells. Through collaboration with Fyodor Urnov and his colleagues at Sangamo Biosciences, David’s lab became the first to use genome editing to express fluorescent fusion proteins at native levels in mammalian cells to avoid perturbing the processes being investigated.Currently, David is Chair of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology Editor in Chief of the American Society for Cell Biology’s research journal, Molecular Biology of the Cell. Previously, he served as Head of the Division of Cell and Developmental Biology and the Graduate Program in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. He has served on numerous editorial boards and NIH grant review study sections, and has organized several international research conferences. In 1999 he was Program Chair for the American Society for Cell Biology’s annual national meeting. David earned a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry with high honors at UC Berkeley working on transcription enzymology with Michael Chamberlin, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Biophysics with Marc Kirschner at the University of California, San Francisco. He performed his postdoctoral studies with David Botstein at MIT.