Professor Bowman received an undergraduate degree in biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and carried out his graduate research in molecular biology at Princeton University. During his Ph.D., he studied actin binding proteins and an enterotoxin from rotavirus using X-ray crystallography. He continued a focus on structural biology as a postdoc in the laboratory of John Kuriyan at UC Berkeley, where he solved the structure of the eukaryotic clamp loader RFC complex bound to the PCNA sliding clamp. He joined the faculty of the Biophysics Department at Johns Hopkins in 2005, where his group’s focus has been on the structure and mechanisms of chromatin remodelers.