He was awarded an EMBO long-term postdoctoral fellowship in 1984 and moved to the laboratory of Donald D. Brown at the Department of Embryology, Carnegie Institution of Washington in Baltimore.
In 1990 he was appointed Chief of the newly founded Laboratory of Molecular Embryology (LME).
He left NIH and moved to the biotechnology firm Sangamo BioSciences Inc. in Richmond, California, in 2000, as Senior Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer.
He will be known mainly for his work in promoting the idea that chromatin plays a dynamic role in regulating gene expression.
He died as a result of injuries suffered in a road accident in Rio de Janeiro on 26 May 2001. http://jcs.biologists.org/cgi/reprint/114/17/3073.pdf Chromatin: Structure and Function Alan Wolffe.