Dr Charles Bell is a senior post-doctoral researcher, Australian Research Council DECRA fellow and Career Track Fellow at Mater Research. He currently works in the laboratory of Professor Geoffrey Faulkner focussing on fundamental questions in the fields of transcriptional regulation, epigenetics and cancer biology. Dr Bell performed his undergraduate degree at the University of Queensland, where he was awarded the University of Queensland University Medal. After his degree, he moved to Melbourne to perform his PhD with the world-renowned researcher, Professor Mark Dawson. During his PhD and subsequent post-doctoral period in the Dawson laboratory, he published a number of high impact papers including in Nature, Science, Nature Genetics, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Cancer, Cancer Cell, and Cancer Stem Cell. Most notably, Dr Bell is first and corresponding author on a recent Nature Genetics paper, which provided fundamental insights into how expression of mRNA is regulated. Since moving back to Queensland and joining Geoff Faulkner’s laboratory, Dr Bell has been working on a variety of projects as he attempts to establish the basis for his own future laboratory. Dr Bell hopes that as we enter a new era of biology, he and his future laboratory will be able to make major contributions to understanding how gene expression is regulated, with the ultimate goal of making biology more predictable and programmable.