Dr. Strahl is a professor in the department of biochemistry and biophysics in the School of Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is also the faculty director of the High-Throughput Peptide Synthesis and Arraying core facility (UNC HTPSA) and serves as the director of Graduate Studies in his home department.
Dr. Strahl began his career at UNC-Greensboro, where he obtained his bachelors degree in chemistry and biology in 1993. He then joined the department of biochemistry at N.C. State University to obtain his doctorate degree in biochemistry. In 1998, Dr. Strahl performed his postdoctoral studies under the mentorship of David Allis at the University of Virginia’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics.
In December of 2001, he initiated his own lab at UNC. There, his lab has been deciphering the role of histone modifications – such as lysine methylation, lysine ubiquitination and lysine acetylation – in chromatin function. Using yeast and human cells as model systems, his group has been determining the role of a number of histone-modifying enzymes and how they contribute to gene regulation and heterochromatin formation.