Chuck Langley is Distinguished Professor of Genetics at UC Davis. Langley's PhD is from UT Austin in 1971, after which he was a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He spent 17 years at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences campus in Research Triangle Park, N.C., before moving to Davis in 1989. Langley's scientific interests address the forces that shape the genetic variation within and between species, which are most readily discerned at the interface between theory and experimental observation. In recent years, his research activities have focused on three main areas: (i) theoretical analyses and computational tools to be applied in the study of genomic variation within and between populations and species; (ii) experimental investigations of genetic mechanisms that shape DNA sequence polymorphism and divergence; (iii) a strenuous effort to create the population samples of fully sequenced genomes, to serve as the foundation for a significant advance in the analysis of natural variation and evolutionary processes. Rapid advancement on this latter goal has created exciting opportunities for new research on topics such as the evolutionary impact of chromatin structure and the population dynamics of variation in the "dark" regions of the genome, e.g., centromeric and telomeric. Langley is a recipient of the Genetics Society of America Medal and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has written well over 100 scientific publications over the course of his career.