Arshad Desai is a Professor of Cellular & Molecular Medicine at UC San Diego and Head of the Laboratory of Chromosome Biology at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. He earned his bachelor’s degree from California State University, Hayward, and his Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the University of California, San Francisco. His postdoctoral work took him to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology & Genetics in Dresden. Since 2002, he has led his own research group in San Diego, focusing on the microtubule cytoskeleton, cell division, centromere identity, and cancer genome instability.