Dr. Michael Beer received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Princeton University and switched fields into genomics following the sequencing of the human genome. He now puts his physics training to good use at Johns Hopkins University where he directs the Computational Regulatory Genomics Laboratory in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the McKusick-Nathans Department of Genetic Medicine, building quantitative models of how enhancers control cell fate and how regulatory variation contributes to human disease and evolution. He was a Searle Scholar, serves on the editorial board of Genome Research, and is a member of the ENCODE consortium.