J. Peter Gergen is a Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University. The research in his laboratory uses the Drosophila model system to investigate the developmental regulation of gene expression. He has previously served as Director of the tri-institutional (Stony Brook University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory) Graduate Program in Genetics and as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the Graduate School. He currently serves as the Director of Undergraduate Biology, a Program that provides advising and student support for the largest undergraduate major at Stony Brook and that provides administrative and technical support to faculty in three different life science departments that offer more than 70 different biology courses to more than 13,000 student registrants annually. As the Biology Program Director, he has worked to increase undergraduate participation in independent research and has led local efforts to transform undergraduate science education. This includes Stony Brook's serving as a host for Regional Summer Institutes in 2013 and 2019. Most recently he was a co-leader of the 2022 Northeast Regional Summer Institute hosted by Macmillan Learning.