Shiv Grewal began his scientific career at the University of Cambridge, UK, where he held the prestigious Cambridge-Nehru scholarship. In 1993, he joined National Cancer Institute as a postdoctoral fellow to pursue his interests in the epigenetic control of gene expression. Apart from his pioneering work on the role of centromeric repeats in heterochromatin assembly, he showed that epigenetic imprints can be stably propagated through meiosis and in some instances inherited in cis. He also identified factors involved in modifications of histones as key components of epigenetic marking process.

Dr. Grewal joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as an Assistant Professor in 1998, and was promoted to Associate Professor position. In 2003, he joined National Cancer Institute, Bethesda as a Senior Investigator. A recent discovery by Dr. Grewal’s laboratory demonstrating a highly conserved connection between RNAi and heterochromatin assembly has revolutionized the current thinking on how complex genomes are assembled into higher-order chromatin structures. This important contribution was selected as Breakthrough of the Year 2002 by Science magazine. Dr. Grewal is recipient of the prestigious Newcomb-Cleveland Prize, NIH Merit Award, and the Demerec-Kaufmann award.