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Peter Laird was born in Massachusetts, USA, but at the age of nine, moved to The Netherlands. He earned his BS and his MS from the University of Leiden. After receiving his PhD in 1988 at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, he joined the laboratory of Dr Anton Berns to work on gene targeting in mice. He then moved to Boston to work with Dr Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute. During this second postdoctoral fellowship, he used a mouse model system to provide the first direct evidence for a causal role of DNA methylation in cancer, published in the journal Cell in 1995. In 1996, he was recruited as Assistant Professor to the University of Southern California. His work at USC has led to the invention of two new DNA methylation analysis techniques, COBRA, published in 1997, and MethyLight, published in 1999, and patented in 2001. | 