Joseph Puglisi was born and raised in New Jersey. He received his B.A. in chemistry from The Johns Hopkins University in 1984 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989. He has studied and taught in Strasbourg, Boston, and Santa Cruz, and is currently professor of structural biology at Stanford University. His research interests are in the structure and mechanism of the ribosome and the use of NMR spectroscopy to study RNA structure. He has been a Dreyfus Scholar, Sloan Scholar, and Packard Fellow