Dr. Piccirilli is Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. After receiving his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of Scranton, he spent a year as a Fulbright fellow at the Aachen Institute of Technology in Germany. He received his Ph.D. degree in chemistry from Harvard University, where he studied with Steven Benner, both as a graduate student at Harvard and as a Harvard traveling scholar at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. He did his postdoctoral research with Thomas Cech at the University of Colorado at Boulder.