Michael Carson received his B.S. in Genetics from the University of Alberta and his Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Washington.  Dr. Carson came east to do a post-doctoral fellowship in Bacterial Genetics at Harvard Medical School.  Dr. Carson began teaching at a four-year college in 1991 and joined Bridgewater State College in 2000.   His expertise is with both classical genetic analysis and molecular genetics and he teaches Genetics and Human Genetics for majors, Human Heredity, and other non-majors biology courses.

Dr. Carson’s research relates to proteins that control cell division in the bacterial species, Escherichia coli. Approaches to this problem include isolation of new mutants, a technique that is very amenable to involving undergraduate students in research projects.  His additional interests are in bioinformatics and the social and medical implications of genetic and molecular genetics technologies such as DNA fingerprinting, genetic testing for human disease and gene therapy.  Dr. Carson spends off-hours with his family, numerous animals and loves the beaches and whales of New England.