Ignacio Tinoco was an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, and a postdoctoral fellow at Yale. He then went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he has remained. His research interest has been on the structures of nucleic acids, particularly RNA. He was chairman of the Department of Energy committee that recommended in 1987 a major initiative to sequence the human genome. His present research is on unfolding single RNA molecules by force.