Dr. Hermann Steller Ph.D. is the Strang Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Apoptosis and Cancer Biology at the Rockefeller University and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Prior to this, he was professor of neurobiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Steller has served on many advisory boards and committees, including as chairman of the CDF-5 study section at the National Institute of Health, and he is currently the chair of the Academic Council of the Rockefeller University. Dr. Steller pioneered the use of Drosophila as a genetic model for cell death research, and this work has provided many important new insights into the regulation of apoptosis. Dr. Steller received his diploma in microbiology and molecular genetics from the University of Frankfurt, and his Ph.D. in molecular biology from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and the University of Heidelberg. He is a member of the National Institutes of Health, American College of Surgeons and is an assistant neurobiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston