Dr. Kleaveland received his M.D., Ph.D. degree from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his doctoral training with Mark Kahn, during which he gained critical insights into cardiovascular development using knockout mice to model familial Cerebral Cavernous Malformation (CCM), a rare autosomal-dominant disorder of blood vessels in the brain that causes seizure and hemorrhagic stroke. After clinical training in pathology at MGH, Ben joined David Bartel’s lab at the Whitehead Institute and MIT. There, Ben developed a strong interest in long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) and other types of noncoding RNA. At that time, a few dozen lncRNAs were known to be conserved from human to fish, suggesting that they might have important functions in mammals. Ben generated mouse knockouts for two of these lncRNAs, Cyrano and Megamind, and observed striking molecular phenotypes in animals lacking Cyrano. This gave Ben a foothold into the discovery of a fascinating regulatory network in the brain that is centered on four interacting noncoding RNAs: one lncRNA (Cyrano), one circular RNA (Cdr1as), and two microRNAs (miR-7 and miR-671). He explored this network with impressive rigor, generating new mouse-knockout models that revealed the molecular consequences of each of the key nodes/edges of the network (Kleaveland et al., Cell 2018). He joins us at Cornell to pursue both research and clinical activities as the Assistant Director of the Central Laboratories.