[1][5][6][7] Sternberg was educated at Hendon County Grammar School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in natural sciences (theoretical physics) in 1972.
[2][8][9][10][11][12] After postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford, Sternberg became a Lecturer in the Department of Crystallography at Birkbeck College, London.
[28] During his DPhil research at Oxford he worked with Janet Thornton and they undertook some of the first systematic analyses of protein structure.
[citation needed] His group, particularly Lawrence Kelley, have developed the widely used Phyre/Phyre2 web server[29][30][31] for protein structure prediction.
[citation needed] Recently his PhD student Chris Yates developed SuSPect,[32] a novel powerful method to predict the phenotypic effects of Single-nucleotide polymorphisms and other amino acid variants.