Keith A. Maggert earned his B.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of California Santa Cruz in 1992. He worked for 3 years with Michael Levine at the University of California San Diego, studying the developmental genetics of mesoderm formation in Drosophila, before moving to the Salk Institute and completing his Ph.D. in 2000 studying centromere structure with Gary Karpen. His postdoctoral work investigating the epigenetics of chromosome imprinting was completed in 2004, with Kent Golic at the Univeristy of Utah and the Stowers Institute. In 2004, he was hired as assistant professor of Biology at Texas A&M Univeristy, and moved to the University of Arizona in 2015.