Michael Grunstein


Michael Grunstein is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Chemistry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
The only surviving child of Holocaust survivors, he obtained his Bachelor of Science degree from McGill University in Montreal, and his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He did his post-doctoral training at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where he invented the colony hybridization screening technique for recombinant DNAs in David Hogness' laboratory.
After coming to UCLA in 1975, Grunstein pioneered the genetic analysis of histones in yeast and showed for the first time that histones are regulators of gene activity in living cells. His laboratory's studies provided inspiration for the eukaryotic histone code and underlie the modern study of epigenetics. His work, which "catapulted the field forward", was recognized in 2018 with the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.

Honors and awards