After that he went to MIT where he received his PhD in Biology for work on nematode development with Robert Horvitz.
He went on to do postdoctoral research with Ira Herskowitz in yeast molecular development at the University of California San Francisco.
[4] Sternberg is a coauthor on the article, "Autism-associated missense genetic variants impact locomotion and neurodevelopment in Caenorhabditis elegans" (2019).
They used C. elegans as a genetic model to look for phenotypic missense alleles collected from autism spectrum disorder studies done in humans.
They found that 70% of missense alleles showed evident phenotypic changes in locomotion, morphology, and fecundity.
They used this method to show subtle phenotypic changes and the effect that missense mutations can have on human disease.
They did find that 14 missense variants have a significant function in C. elegans orthologs of human genes.
They found that these genes and others may act in a hierarchy to affect decisions at different stages within cell lineages.
Huang, Tzou, and Sternberg discovered that lin-15 encodes 2 transcripts that do not overlap and are transcribed in the same direction.
[11] “Evidence of a mate-finding cue in the hermaphrodite nematode Caenorhabditis elegans”(2002) Simon and Sternberg performed several different assays and found that males specifically, respond to a sexually dimorphic cue that hermaphrodites gives off.
This makes it possible to easily compare data from different labs by standardizing behavioral assays.