Judith Kimble received her Bachelor's degree in biomedical sciences from the
University of California, Berkeley in 1971. She originally intended to become a physician. However, whilst in her last year as an undergraduate, she took a temporary job at the University of Copenhagen Medical School, she taught medical students about the structure and function of human organs, which, combined with her undergraduate studies in human embryology, sparked an interest in the "basic problems in animal development." She began her graduate studies in 1974 at the
University of Colorado Boulder. There, she worked with molecular biologist David Hirsh who was studying the model organism
Caenorhabditis elegans. Kimble then moved to the
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where she spent four years as a postdoctoral fellow working with Sir
John Sulston on the control of
organogenesis. During the course of her work, Kimble found a special somatic cell at the tip of the gonad which tells nearby germ cells - reproductive cells - how to divide. When she destroyed the distal tip cell, germ cells stopped dividing. When she moved the somatic cell to a different place, germ cells started dividing in that new location. This was the first time a single cell with such an oversight function had been identified. ==Early career==