Samara Reck-Peterson, PhD, received a BA in Biology from Carleton College; a PhD in Cell Biology from Yale University; and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2007, she joined the department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, where she was an Assistant and Associate Professor and the Associate Director of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences PhD program. Since 2015, she has been a Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Biological Sciences at University of California San Diego. She was the recipient of a NIH New Innovator award, a Rita Allen and Milton Cassel Scholar award, a HHMI Simons Faculty Scholar award and became an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2018. She is the Faculty Director of the Nikon Imaging Center at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Reck-Peterson’s research focuses on the molecular basis of microtubule-based intracellular transport.