An interview with Mike Levine

Mike Levine, director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University, is a developmental biologist who has dedicated his career to understanding how gene expression is regulated during development. Some of his most significant research, such as the co-discovery of the homeobox genes and his work on even skipped stripe 2 , was performed in Drosophila , but he has since branched out to Ciona intestinalis , which he is using as a model to understand how vertebrate features have evolved. We had a lively chat with Mike at this year9s Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) meeting, where he was awarded the Edwin Grant Conklin Medal.