Miles Wilkinson is a Professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He obtained his B.S. in Biological Sciences from the University of California, Santa Barbara with an associated Honor’s Degree in Genetics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (1980). He obtained his Ph.D. in immunology from the University of Warwick, England (1984). He did his first postdoctoral work at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, on the topic of breast cancer (1984-1985). He completed his postdoctoral training at UCSD (1985-1987), where he initiated studies that led to the work his laboratory still works on. His first faculty position was at Oregon Health Sciences University (1987-1994), followed by a long tenure at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer (1994-2009) where he fully developed his research program. The main interests of his laboratory are: (i) post-transcriptional regulatory pathways, and (ii) homeobox gene circuits. With regard to the first topic, his primary interest is elucidating the regulation and physiological roles of nonsense-mediated decay (NMD), a RNA decay pathway that rapidly degrades aberrant mRNAs harboring premature termination (nonsense codons) and a major subset of normal mRNAs. The discovery that defects in NMD cause intellectual disability in humans is a driving force for his recent studies. His second research interest revolves around his discovery of a large X-linked homeobox gene cluster—the RHOX cluster—which encodes transcription factors preferentially expressed in the reproductive tract in mammals.