Owen Witte received his undergraduate degree from Cornell and his MD from Stanford University where he trained with Irv Weissman. He completed postdoctoral research at MIT in the laboratory of David Baltimore. In 1980 he joined the faculty at UCLA where he presently is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Professor of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics where he holds the President's Chair in Developmental Immunology, and Professor of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.