Shiv Grewal

Biography

Dr. 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. 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. He has been named an NIH Distinguished Investigator and is currently serving as the Chief of the Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Head of the Chromosome Biology Section of the Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute. Dr. Grewal and colleagues discovered a highly conserved connection between RNAi and heterochromatin assembly. This important contribution was selected as Breakthrough of the Year 2002 by Science magazine. Three papers from Dr. Grewal's laboratory are cited for historic discoveries over the past 50 years by Nature. He is recipient of the prestigious Newcomb-Cleveland Prize, NIH Merit Award, and the NIH Directors’ award. Dr. Grewal has been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Research Interest

1) RNA interference (RNAi), 2) Heterochromatin assembly, 3) Chromatin remodeling, 4) epigenetic inheritance, 5) higher order chromatin structure, 6) genome stability, 7) Cell Biology, 8) Chromosome Biology, 9) Developmental Biology, 10) Genetics and Genomics, 11) Molecular Biology and Biochemistry.