Dr. Starrett is an Independent Research Scholar in the Laboratory of Cellular Oncology at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. His group studies how tumor viruses, primarily polyomaviruses and papillomaviruses, cause genetic instability that leads to viral and host genome mutagenesis and eventually cancer through cellular models and patient tumor 'omics. He received his B.S. in Medical Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He then earned a Ph.D. from the Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology program at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities where he was a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This was followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2019, Dr. Starrett was selected for the inaugural year of the NIH Independent Research Scholar Program.