Meyer is a native Californian, born and raised in
Stockton. Meyer completed her undergraduate BS at
Stanford University, working with David Clayton. She began her PhD at the
University of California, Berkeley and completed her graduate studies in 1979 at
Harvard University in the lab of
Mark Ptashne, working on
gene regulation in
lambda phage, a bacterial virus which infects bacteria E. coli. In 1979 Meyer began postdoctoral research at the
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, studying how chromosomes determine sex at the laboratory of Sydney Brenner, who later won a Nobel Prize for establishing the nematode worm
Caenorhabditis elegans as an important model organism for research on development. Switching from virus to
Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a
roundworm, Meyer still studies gene regulation, but turning to sex determination. Meyer discovered the master gene involved in sex determination. Meyer's early work focused on how
C. elegans "counts" the number of X chromosomes and sets of autosomes to determine its sex, as well as how it adjusts to the imbalance in the number of X chromosomes between the two sexes. In
C. elegans, individuals with two X chromosomes are self-fertilizing hermaphrodites; those with only one X chromosome are males. A popular hypothesis when Meyer began her postdoctoral work was that the worms compensate for the difference in the number of copies of genes on the X chromosome between the two sexes. But it wasn't clear whether the worms accomplished this by upregulating genes on the X chromosome in males or by downregulating genes on the X chromosome in hermaphrodites. Meyer established her first lab at MIT after leaving the MRC, starting with the question of how the nematode specifies its sex. Further analysis of the mechanism underlying dosage compensation produced many key insights into gene regulation. In 1990, Meyer and her husband
Tom Cline gave up their tenured positions (she at MIT, he at Princeton) -she accepted a full faculty appointment at the
University of California, Berkeley. In 1997, Meyer becomes an HHMI investigator. Her lab identified a gene they named
xol-1 as the master switch for sex determination. Meyer's group also found that transcription factors encoded by both the X chromosome and the autosomes battle to control whether
xol-1 is transcriptionally active or inactive. She became a member of ASCB (American association of cell biology) in 1995. She was also elected as a member to AAAS (American academy of Arts and Sciences) in 1995. In 2014, Meyer was elected to the
American Philosophical Society. In 2018, Meyer was honored with the
E.B. Wilson Medal by
American Society for Cell Biology's (ASCB) highest honor for science, for her significant and far-reaching contributions to cell biology over a lifetime in science. Meyer was also honored with 2018
Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal which is awarded for lifetime achievement in genetics. This honor is given in recognition of her groundbreaking work on chromosome behaviors that govern gene expression, development, and heredity. At the same year, Meyer was elected to the
National Academy of Medicine, considered one of the highest honors in health and medicine, "for groundbreaking work on chromosome dynamics that impact gene expression, development and heredity using the nematode as a model organism. ==Notable papers==