Dr. Meyer is also Professor of Genetics and Development in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. She received her B.A. degree in biology from Stanford University and her Ph.D. degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University, where she studied with Mark Ptashne. Her postdoctoral work with Sydney Brenner was conducted at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. Prior to her present position, Dr. Meyer was a tenured faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Barbara Meyer studies sex determination in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans to discover fundamental principles in developmental biology: How do gene networks specify cell fates? How is developmental potential restricted prior to differentiation? How do species evolve? She also studies X chromosome–wide regulation of gene expression, a process known as dosage compensation, and its mechanistic link to higher-order chromatin structure, recombination in meiosis, and chromosome segregation during mitosis and meiosis.