Encyclopedia of Reproduction

Dr. Michael Skinner is the Eastlick Distinguished Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Washington State University. He did his B.S. in Chemistry at Reed College in Portland Oregon, his Ph.D, in Biochemistry at Washington State University and his Postdoctoral Fellowship at the C.H. Best Institute at the University of Toronto. Recently he did a sabbatical in bioinformatics at Rosetta/Merck. He has been on the faculty of the Pharmacology Department at Vanderbilt University and the Reproductive Sciences and Physiology at the University of California at San Francisco. Dr. Skinner's research is focused on the area of reproductive biology and environmental epigenetics. Past studies have elucidated several critical events in the initiation of male sex differentiation, testis development and ovarian primordial follicle development. His current research has demonstrated the ability of environmental toxicants, such as endocrine disruptors, to promote the epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of adult onset disease phenotypes, due to abnormal germ line epigenetic programming during gonadal development. This non-genetic form of inheritance has a role in disease etiology and areas such as evolution. Dr. Skinner has over 300 peer reviewed publications and has given over 300 invited symposia, plenary lectures and university seminars. His research has been highlighted in BBC, Smithsonian and PBS documentaries and selected as top 100 discoveries in 2005 and 2007 by Discover. In 2013 he was awarded the Smithsonian "American Ingenuity Award" in natural sciences. He did a TEDx Rainier Seattle talk in 2014 on the Ghost in Your Genome. Dr. Skinner established and was the founding Director of the Washington State University and University of Idaho Center for Reproductive Biology (CRB) since its inception in 1996. The CRB developed to have over 100 faculty and is one of the largest reproductive sciences research Centers in the world. Dr. Skinner also established and was the founding Director of the Center for Integrated Biotechnology (CIB). The CIB was established in 2002 and had over 170 active research faculty members. In 2008 he stepped down as Director of the Centers to focus his efforts on his research. In addition, Dr Skinner has been actively involved with the start-up of several biotechnology companies. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford journal Environmental Epigenetics and Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Reproduction second edition, to be published by Elsevier in 2018.