in genetics from Cornell University and did his undergraduate thesis work in the lab of Tom Fox on nuclear control of mitochondrial function in yeast.

His Ph.D. advisor at MIT was David Botstein, and the title of his thesis was "Genetic analysis of the yeast microtubule cytoskeleton."

Stearns' thesis identified exceptions to the genetic complementation test that were useful for defining genetic interactions and for the first time used the term "synthetic lethality" in the modern sense of two non-lethal mutations resulting in lethality in the double mutant.

He was a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow with Marc Kirschner at UCSF, where he published work on gamma-tubulin[5] and in vitro reconstitution of the centrosome.

They previously lived near Stanford University and tended a fruit tree orchard[20] originally planted by John Hensill, former dean of Natural Sciences at San Francisco State University, and a founder of the Redwood City Farmers Market.