Dr. Galburt studied Physics as an undergraduate at Brown University and went on to get a Ph.D. in Biochemistry with Barry Stoddard at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. During his postdoctoral work with Carlos Bustamante at Berkeley, he used single-molecule techniques to study transcription elongation and pausing. He spent two years at the Max Planck for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden working with Stephan Grill on mechano-chemical models of RNAP II. His lab at Washington University in St. Louis investigates mechanisms of transcription initiation from bacteria to humans using a combination of single-molecule and ensemble biophysical and biochemical techniques.