Richard Jorgensen received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin in 1978, where he worked on transposon-encoded functions for transposition and antibiotic resistance. After that, he did postdoctorals in plant molecular genetics and evolutionary genetics at the Carnegie Institute on the Stanford campus and at the University of California at Davis. From 1983-1990 he managed a research group in the agbiotech industry where he and Dr. Carolyn Napoli discovered the phenomenon of sense cosuppression in petunias in 1990, a subject he has continued to work on ever since, first at the University of California at Davis and now at the University of Arizona, where he also studies evolutionary and functional diversification of the epigenome. In addition, Dr. Jorgensen serves as the Editor in Chief of The Plant Cell, the leading plant biology journal, and was elected a AAAS Fellow in 2005.