Doctor Geoffrey Girnun earned his BS and PhD from the University of Iowa. He studied the connection between essential fatty acids, which are good for healthy cells, and how they control enzymes in cells that protect them from being damaged by the sun. He did postdoctoral work at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, where he worked on basic questions about cell development, found new genes that protect against cancer, and came up with new ways to treat some of the most common and drug-resistant cancers. At the University of Maryland in Baltimore, Geoffrey Girnun set up his own lab in 2007. In 2013, he moved to Stony Brook University and set up his own lab there until 2019.