Donald Rio, PhD, is a Professor of Biophysics, Biochemistry and Structural Biology in the Molecular and Cell Biology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a biochemist and molecular biologist known for his work on the regulation of gene expression. He has studied mobile DNA elements (transposons) and alternative pre-messenger RNA splicing in both Drosophila and human cells. His group has carried out genetic, biochemical and genomic studies to investigate how proteins can interact with DNA to catalyze DNA mobility and with RNA to set up patterns of alternative splicing by the spliceosome. He received a PhD in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA degree in chemistry and biology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was a Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and an Associate Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology prior to moving to UC Berkeley.