He received his B.A. in Biology and English from Earlham College and his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology from The University of Chicago. As a graduate student he began his focus on the functional organization of the vertebrate genome. Dr. Kosak went on to pursue the relationship between gene regulation and nuclear organization as a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Mark Groudine at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. With his own group at Northwestern, Dr. Kosak continues to broadly examine how the human genome self-organizes in relation to its myriad functions.