page_title: Nat Sternberg
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Nat Sternberg / Career
context_page_description: Nat L. Sternberg was an American molecular biologist and bacteriophage researcher, particularly known for his work on DNA recombination and the phage P1.
context_section_description: In 1970–72, Sternberg held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, under the direction of François Gros, where he researched the head proteins of phage λ. He then returned to the US, taking up the position of staff fellow in the laboratory of Robert Weisberg at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, where he continued to study λ, in collaboration with Lynn W. Enquist and others.
  In 1976, Sternberg joined the group being established by Michael Yarmolinsky in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology of the National Cancer Institute's Frederick Cancer Research Center at Fort Detrick, Frederick, Maryland, where he started to study the phage P1. From 1981 he directed his own group, continuing to research the P1 phage, as well as branching out to study DNA recombination in mammalian cells. In 1984, his group moved to the Central Research and Development Department of DuPont, in Wilmington, Delaware, and Sternberg was a senior research fellow at DuPont Merck at the time of his death.
  Sternberg advised the NIH on human genome research. He served on the editorial board of the academic journal, Journal of Molecular Biology.
caption: Dimer of P1 Cre recombinase bound to DNA
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