Peter Follette, Ph.D.

I grew up in the Seattle area and graduated from the University of Washington in 1991 with a B.A. in Anthropology. At the UW, I worked in the lab of Charles Laird studying the inheritance pattern of the Fragile-X syndrome, the leading inherited cause of mental retardation in humans.

In the fall of 1991, I moved to San Francisco to pursue my Ph.D. in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Joining the lab of Patrick O'Farrell, I studied the control of DNA replication during the development of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In particular, I examined the role of the MCM2 gene in the initiation of replication, and provided evidence that mutations in MCM2 decrease the number of active replication origins in the genome. I also examined the control of the central cell cycle regulator the CDK-cyclin complex in both proliferating cells and in endoreduplicating cells, specialized cells that undergo rounds of S phase but no mitosis. I showed that fluctuations in the levels of this regulator are required for successive rounds of S phase in endoreduplicating cells.

After finishing my Ph.D. in 1997, I worked during the day as a patent agent in the law firm of Townsend, Townsend and Crew LLP, and at night writing articles and preparing textbook-related materials for the Brooks/Cole publishing company. From 1998 until 2000, I wrote more than 40 articles about genetics research for Brooks/Cole's Biology Resource Center, an online resource for undergraduates.

In late 2000, I moved to the Paris area, where I worked as a patent agent for the French biotechnology company Genset. In 2002, I left the company to try my hand full-time as a freelance science writer and editor. Since then, I have prepared numerous activities for various biology textbooks, written about science and science policy for journals such as Science, and have worked as a professional manuscript editor and translator. Since the summer of 2005, I have also been teaching scientific writing, presentations, and English at the science campus of the University of Nice - Sophia Antipolis. Finally, since the summer of 2008, I have been back in the lab, studying the control of cell polarity in yeast.