Randal Halfmann obtained his Ph.D. in Biology with Susan Lindquist at MIT, then started his own lab at UT Southwestern Medical Center as an NIH Early Independence Awardee. While there, he discovered that self-propagating protein aggregates known as prions function to enforce cell fate commitment in organisms ranging from budding yeast to humans. In 2015 he moved to the Stowers Institute in Kansas City, MO, where his lab investigates both the mechanisms and biological consequences of protein supersaturation and self-assembly. His work is elucidating how protein self-assembly controls the granularity of protein activity in biological space and time, in phenomena ranging from signal transduction to cellular memories to aging.