Barbara Jane Wold

Barbara Wold is Bren Professor of Molecular Biology and Director and Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of the Richard N. Merkin Institute for Translational Research at California Institute of Technology. Wold is a genome scientist whose research is focused on the discovery of how gene activity is encoded in the DNA and the development of the technologies needed to figure that out. She and her research group use genomics to understand the basis of cell identity, how it is disrupted in disease, and how it can be engineered. Her group is also active in building international functional genomics databases and computational resources. Wold served as the director of the Beckman Institute at Caltech from 2001–11, was the founder, in 2012, of the National Cancer Institute's Center for Cancer Genomics, and since 2019 she has been the Director of Caltech's Merkin Institute for Translational Research. She earned her Ph.D. from Caltech and joined the faculty in 1981.