Morgan received his PhD in developmental biology from Johns Hopkins University in 1890 and taught at Bryn Mawr College before arriving at Columbia in 1904 to assume a newly established chair in experimental zoology. In 1910, he began his study of Drosophila melanogaster, the insect with which his name will always be associated. It was working with undergraduate students Calvin Bridges and Alfred Sturtevant, and in Schemerhorn Hall's "Fly Room" with graduate and postdoctoral scientists such as Hermann J. Mueller and George Beadle, that Morgan discovered the chromosomal basis for the inheritance of traits. He left Columbia in 1928 to serve as chair of the Biology Division at the California Institute of Technology.