A stem-cell biologist at Stanford University in California, Joanna Wysocka won the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science on 1 April 2013. The biological question that is driving the Wysocka lab's research in the long-term is understanding the epigenetic basis of vertebrate development and differentiation. Although each cell of a multicellular organism is a progeny of a single zygote, and shares the same genetic information with every other cell, cells differentiate to specialized forms such as skin, muscle or nervous cells. The lab's research focuses on understanding the mechanistic basis by which covalent histone modifications regulate gene expression patterns during vertebrate development and differentiation. A second major area of their interest involves chromatin regulation in embryonic stem cells (ESCs), molecular basis of pluripotency and role of histone methyltransferases in cell fate decisions.