Marcin von Grotthuss received a Ph.D. from Radboud University in Nijmegan, Netherlands in 2007. He gained his professional experience at Burnham Institute (La Jolla, CA), University of Washington, (Seattle, WA), Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), University of Cambridge (England, UK), and University of California Irvine (Irvine, CA). His recent work was focused on understanding the balance between fragile regions and functional constraints in shaping gene organization using Drosophila as a model organism. He showed with Michael Ashburner and Jose Ranz, in the cover article published in Genome Research, that fragile regions rather than functional constraints have been the main determinant of the evolution of the Drosophila chromosomes. Currently, he is working on evolutionary aspects of structural genomic variants in the human genome.