Stephen Buratowski, the oldest of four boys, grew up in Iselin, New Jersey. Stephen's father was working as a programmer for a subsidiary of International Business Machines when he met Stephen's mother, who was doing data entry there. His father is an only child, but his mother is one of nine children, and the whole family is still close. In addition, his parents were devout Roman Catholics and brought their boys up in the church. Buratowski and his brothers played a lot of informal sports, went exploring in the "woods", etc. Stephen always liked to read a lot, especially science stories and mysteries (Jules Verne and Encyclopedia Brown), and knew from at least third grade that he wanted to be a scientist. When he visited relatives he loved to play their organ, so his parents bought him one, and he began his musical career. He and friends had a band throughout high school, and in college Buratowski continued with another group of friends. Although he thought his public schools were fairly good, Buratowski did well without having to work much. His parents had not gone to college, and his school's guidance counselors were weak, so Stephen had little help with the idea of college. He followed his friends' lead in trying to score well on Scholastic Aptitude Tests and in applying to colleges. When he met a Princeton University recruiter, Buratowski decided Princeton University was his first choice. He was accepted there, and the financial aid enabled him to enter what he calls paradise. In his junior year he met guest lecturer George Khoury, who read Buratowski's thesis on enhancers. Encouraged, Stephen asked to go into Khoury's lab at the National Cancer Institute during the summer after his graduation. There he did recombinant DNA for the first time. For graduate school Buratowski applied to many schools; everywhere he visited he was told that Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was the best, so he decided to go there. Also, Phillip Sharp was there and was doing gene expression, the kind of work in which Buratowski was interested. He spent the first year in classes, and in April he entered Sharp's lab. There he worked with Steven Hahn on TFIID, from which research they published their first paper in Nature and a second in Cell. He got a "spectacular" PhD thesis from his work; this allowed him to skip the usual postdoc and go across the street to the Fellows Program at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. At about this time Buratowski married Robin Marlor, another MIT scientist, who found a postdoc at the Whitehead Institute. At the end of his fellowship he accepted an assistant professorship at Harvard University and continues to progress toward professorship and tenure. Buratowski teaches in the medical school; he serves on many committees, of which his favorite is the research computing department committee; he manages his lab of about ten people; he writes grant proposals; and he attempts to balance his work life with his life with wife and daughter, with whom he has resumed church attendance.