Steve Jacobsen is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Professor of Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests center on mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance in plants, including the genetics and genomics of DNA methylation, histone methylation, and small RNA driven silencing pathways. The lab also works on gene editing in plants, as well as targeted epigenetics using CRISPR systems. He has published over 200 research articles and reviews. Jacobsen received the Beckman and Searle young investigator awards and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011 and the American Academy of Sciences in 2016.