Dean, Biological Sciences Division

The dean of Biological Sciences Division since 2002, Geoffrey Owen is a former chair of the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology. He is an expert in neurobiology, with a special interest in understanding how information about the external world is encoded by the nervous system.

Born in Bristol, England, Owen received his B.Sc. in physics in 1965 and his Ph.D. in applied optics in 1970 from the University of London. He joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and spent two years as a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge in England before joining the UC Berkeley faculty in 1980.