Pennacchio did his undergraduate studies at Sonoma State University and then went on to graduate studies at Stanford University, receiving a Ph.D. in genetics in 1998. He became a research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1999, and joined the Joint Genome Institute in 2003. He retains his Lawrence Berkeley affiliation as well.[1]
^Fang, Janet (February 21, 2010), "Junk DNA holds clues to heart disease: Deleting a non-coding region leads to narrowing of arteries in mice", Nature, doi:10.1038/news.2010.82.