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Dominique Bergmann We use genetic, genomic and cell biological approaches to study cell fate acquisition, focusing on cases where cell fate is correlated with asymmetric cell division. Our current research is focused on three areas. (1) regulation of stomatal identity by MAP kinase signaling (2)Pattern formation and its reliance on cell communication to regulate division polarity (3) Identification of positive regulators of stomatal formation.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Barbara Block The Block lab investigates endothermy in fish including cellular, ecological and evolutionary physiology. Cellular basis for endothermic metabolism. Research at sea is focused on understanding the movements and physiological ecology of tunas and billfishes to gain insight into the selective advantage of endothermy in fish and habitat selection.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Steven Block Properties of proteins or nucleic acids at the level of single macromolecules and molecular complexes. Experimental tools include laser-based optical traps ("optical tweezers") and a variety of state-of-the-art fluorescence techniques, in conjunction with custom-built instrumentation for the nanometer-level detection of displacements and piconewton-level detection of forces. |
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Xiaoke Chen Brain circuits mediating decisions and behaviorsCONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Larry Crowder Marine ecology, fisheries, bycatch, integrating science and policy, marine conservation.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Martha Cyert The Cyert lab is identifying signaling networks for calcineurin, the conserved Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent phosphatase and target of immunosuppressants FK506 and cyclosporin A, in yeast and mammals. Cell biological investigations of target dephosphorylation reveal calcineurin’s many physiological functions. The role of short linear peptide motifs, or SLiMs, in substrate recognition and network evolution, as well as in regulation of calcineurin activity is also being examined. |
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Gretchen Daily The ecological (and evolutionary) dynamics of biodiversity change in natural and human-modified ecosystems. The quantification and mapping of ecosystem services, in biophysical, economic, and cultural terms. Feasible pathways for and novel approaches to ecological restoration, from biophysical, economic, and cultural perspectives. Field research based mostly in the Neotropics and Hawai'i; ecosystem services projects in a range of sites internationallyCONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Giulio De Leo Fishery management and control and eradication of infectious diseases in the wildlife.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Mark Denny Mechanical design of intertidal organisms. This subject is studied at many different levels of organization, from the molecular, through the material, structural, and organismal, to the ecological.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Rodolfo Dirzo My current work on conservation biology emphasizes the need of complementing the traditional interests of the conservation of taxa with the increasingly needed conservation of ecological processes. Most of my tropical work is carried out in Mexico and Central Amazonia.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Scott Dixon Our interests lie at the intersection of two fundamental biological processes: regulated cell death and metabolism. Using techniques drawn from chemical biology, functional genomics and cell biology we are investigating how perturbation of intracellular metabolic networks can result in novel forms of cell death. We are interested in applying this knowledge to find new ways to selectively eliminate cancer cells and preserve the viability of damaged neurons.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Paul Ehrlich Conservation biology; ecology, evolution, and behavior of natural populations (especially of butterflies); human ecology and evolution.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Marcus Feldman Evolution of complex genetic systems that can undergo both natural selection and recombination. Human demographic studies, particularly of the sex ratio. Human molecular evolution.The evolution of learning as one interface between modern methods in artificial intelligence and models of biological processes, including communication. The interaction of biological and cultural evolution, for example in the spread of food plant domestication across Europe, and the transmission of learned behaviors in contemporary groups.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Jessica Feldman We are interested in understanding design principles within cells that contribute to the diversification of cellular form and function. Using a combination of genetic, biochemical, and live imaging approaches, we are investigating how the microtubule cytoskeleton is spatially organized and the mechanisms underlying organizational changes during development.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Russell Fernald In the course of evolution,two of the strongest selective forces in nature,light and sex, have left their mark on living organisms. I am interested in how the development and function of the nervous system reflects these events. In the visual system, we are studying the cellular basis of retinal development. In the reproductive system, we have indentified a collection of cells in the brain containing gonodotropin releasing hormone(GnRH) that respond to changes in the social conditions by changing size.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Chris Field Ecosystem responses to interacting global changes, controls on the carbon and energy balance of natural ecosystems, and ecology and biogeochemistry at the global scale.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Hunter Fraser We study the regulation and evolution of gene expression using a combination of experimental and computational approaches. Our work brings together quantitative genetics, genomics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology to achieve a deeper understanding of how genetic variation within and between species affects genome-wide gene expression and ultimately shapes the phenotypic diversity of life.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Wolf Frommer Focus:Transport/signaling across the plasma membrane(sugars,amino acids) Tools:FRET-based nanosensors for imaging metabolites in living organisms using confocal fluorescence microscopy;Sensor optimization by computational design;RNAi to modify cellular functions. Goals:Identify unknown sugar effluxers from liver or plant cells;study regulatory networks. Model systems:liver,neuronal and plant cell cultures,C.elegans and Arabidopsis.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Judith Frydman The mechanism of protein folding has become a central problem in biology. We wish to understand the pathways and regulation of protein folding in eukaryotic cells. Knowledge of how proteins actually fold in the cell should eventually provide the basis for controlling protein function under normal conditions and during abnormal conditions of environmental stress and disease.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Tadashi Fukami Ecological and evolutionary community assembly, with emphasis on historical contingency in community structure, ecosystem functioning, biological invasion and ecological restoration, using experimental, theoretical and comparative methods involving bacteria, protists, fungi, plants and animals.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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William Gilly Mechanisms involved in the cellular regulation of properties, density, and spatial distribution of voltage-gated Na and K channels and of ionotropic glutamate receptors cloned from the squid nervous system and expressed in frog oocytes and insect cellsCONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Jeremy Goldbogen Physiological basis of animal performance and ecological function. Animal-borne tags and bio-logging of fine-scale animal movement and physiological processes. Scaling, foraging ecology of ram filter feeders, diving physiology, bioacoustics, and behavioral ecology.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Deborah Gordon Our research examines the social behavior and ecology of social insects. The current research investigates (1) Ant colony organization. (2)Ecology of harvester ant populations.(3)Population genetics of harvester ant populations.(4)The invasive Argentine ant.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Or Gozani Chromatin dynamics regulate fundamental nuclear processes that influence diverse physiologic and pathologic processes. Our research focuses on chromatin modulation by the ING (Inhibitor of Growth) family of tumor suppressor proteins. The goal of our research is to elucidate the molecular mechanism by which ING proteins regulate chromatin under normal conditions and in response to genotoxic insults, and to understand the relationship between these activities and tumor suppressor pathwaysCONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Elizabeth Hadly We study morphologic, genetic, population and community responses to the last several thousand years of climatic change in vertebrate ecosystems of temperate North and South AmericaCONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Philip Hanawalt Philip C. Hanawalt discovered repair replication of DNA, the major process by which all living cells deal with damage to their genetic material. His research group studies the mechanisms by which living cells maintain their genomes in the face of endogenous DNA damage and environmental radiations and chemical carcinogens.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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H Craig Heller Dr. Heller's laboratory works in two areas. One is the neurobiology of sleep, circadian rhythms, and learning disabilities. The other is the regulation of body temperature in mammals and the relationship between temperature and human performance. Dr. Heller is co-director of the Stanford Down Syndrome Research Center. The Center fosters multidisciplinary approaches and collaborations that will help us understand the neural mechanisms underlying the cognitive dysfunction associated with Down Syndrome and other neurodevelopmental disorders. |
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Patricia Jones Genetic, cellular, and molecular mechanisms that regulate adaptive immune responses (the antigen-specific responses carried out by B and T lymphocytes, unique to vertebrates), and innate immune responses (responses present in both invertebrates and vertebrates triggered by microbial components).CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Richard Klein Richard G. Klein researches the archeological and fossil evidence for the evolution of human behavior. He has done fieldwork in Spain and especially in South Africa, where has excavated ancient sites and analyzed the excavated materials since 1969. He has focused on the behavioral changes that allowed anatomically modern Africans to spread to Eurasia about 50,000 years ago, where they swamped or replaced the Neanderthals and other non-modern Eurasians.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Ron Kopito Cellular mechanisms which monitor protein biogenesis and ensure that only properly folded and assembled proteins are deployed within the cell. Genetic biochemical and cell biological approaches are used to identify the machinery involved in recognizing and destroying misfolded proteinsCONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Sharon Long Molecular, genetic, and biochemical techniques are used to study how Rhizobium cells recognize and form nodules on their plant hosts. The association is highly specific: individual species of Rhizobium are classified according to the particular legumes they are able to nodulate.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Christopher Lowe My research interests are in the field of evolution and development, and more specifically the evolution of the deuterostomes. My lab is currently investigating three major areas: The origin and evolution of the vertebrate brain and head. The early evolution of the deuterostome endoderm and mesoderm. The evolution of posterior growth in bilaterians.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Liqun Luo Molecular genetics are used to understand the logic of neural circuit assembly. The human brain is composed of ~10ˆ12 neurons with complex morphologies and intricate connections. We use primarily the simpler brain of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, composed of ~10ˆ5 neurons, to uncover fundamental mechanisms that are likely to be used in our own brain.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Susan McConnell How individual neurons know where they should sit in the brain and with which neurons they should form specific axonal connections. Identify and characterize the progenitor cells that give rise to neuron and the processes by which young neurons locate their correct targets among hundreds of thousands of other neurons in the brain.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Fiorenza Micheli We are investigating how coastal marine assemblages are shaped through the interplay of physical factors and biological interactions, and examining how much of the observed variation in these assemblages can be attributed to human impacts on the marine environment.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Erin Mordecai The community ecology of disease. Impacts of pathogens on plant diversity. Maintenance of parasite and pathogen diversity. Consequences of global change for host-parasite interactions. This work combines mathematical modeling and empirical work. |
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Ashby Morrison Our research interests are to elucidate the contribution of chromatin to mechanisms that promote genomic integrity. The regulation of chromatin is a crucial component of DNA metabolism and processing in eukaryotic organisms. Chromatin-remodeling complexes, modified histones, and higher order chromatin structure are all factors influencing genome stability. We utilize an integrated approach of genetic, biochemical, and molecular techniques, in both yeast and mammalian systems, to examine the involvement of chromatin in processes that prevent genome instability and the pathogenesis of disease.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Mary Beth Mudgett My laboratory investigates how bacterial pathogens employ proteins secreted by the type III secretion system (TTSS) to manipulate eukaryotic signaling to promote disease. We study TTSS effectors in the plant pathogen Xanthomonas campestris, the causal agent of bacterial spot disease of pepper and tomato. For these studies, we apply biochemical, cell biological, and genetic approaches using the natural hosts and two model pathosystems.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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W James Nelson Our research objectives are to understand cellular mechanisms involved in development and maintenance of cell polarity. Recent studies indicate that development of epithelial cell polarity is a multistage process requiring instructive extracellular cues (eg. cell-cell and cell-substratum contact) and reorganization of proteins in the cytoplasm and on the plasma membrane. Once established, polarity is maintained by targeting and retention of proteins to functionally distinct apical and basal-lateral plasma membrane domains.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Stephen Palumbi We study genetics, evolution, conservation, population biology and systematics in a wide variety of marine organisms. Primary focus is the use of molecular genetic techniques in conservation, including identification of dolphin and whale products in commercial markets. Also, molecular evolution of reproductive isolation and its influence on speciation.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Kabir Peay Ecology, community structure & ecosystem function of plant-microbial symbiosisCONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Dmitri Petrov We are interested in a wide range of questions in molecular evolution and molecular population genetics. We do theoretical, computational and experimental work to address these questions. Our primary focus at the moment is on (i) population genetics and molecular mechanisms of adaptation and (ii) genome evolution.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Jonathan Pritchard We are interested in a broad range of problems at the interface of genomics and evolutionary biology. One current focus of the lab is in understanding how genetic variation impacts gene regulation and complex traits. We also have long-term interests in using genetic data to learn about population structure, history and adaptation, especially in humans.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Kristy Red-Horse We use blood vessel development as a model to study the signals that instruct cell fate and guide morphogenesis during organ formation in the mammalian embryo. Our current focus is on fate mapping the different sources that contribute to the coronary arteries of the heart and identifying the molecules that direct their migration and differentiation. The long-term goal is to use this information to better understand and treat cardiovascular diseases.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Noah Rosenberg Research in the lab addresses problems in evolutionary biology and human genetics through a combination of mathematical modeling, computer simulations, development of statistical methods, and inference from population-genetic data. Our current work covers topics such as human genetic variation, inference of human evolutionary history, the role of population genetics in the search for disease-susceptibility genes, the relationship of gene trees and species trees, and mathematical properties of statistics used for analyzing genetic variability.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Robert Sapolsky How a neuron dies during aging or following various neurological insults; How such neuron death can be accelerated by stress; The design of gene therapy strategies to protect endangered neurons from neurological disease.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Mark Schnitzer The Schnitzer lab develops and uses fluorescence endoscopy and microscopy imaging methods to study biophysical events underlying various forms of learning and memory. A mjaor goal is to accomplish studies of these cellular and molecular events in alert animals. Using fluorescence imaging of neuronal populations, indvidual neurons and neuronal dendtrites, the Schnitzer lab aims to monitor cellular dynamics and simple behaviors concurrently in alert rodents.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Carla Shatz The major goal of research in the Shatz Laboratory is to discover cellular and molecular mechanisms that transform early fetal and neonatal brain circuits into mature connections, and in particular to determine the extent to which neural function during critical periods of development is needed for these circuits to tune up into adult patterns of connectivity.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Kang Shen We are interested in understanding how synapses are formed, the final step in wiring a nervous system. In particular, the molecular mechanisms underlying synaptic specificity: how neurons recognize each other and how they make decisions about forming synapses between contacting neurites during development. We use molecular, genetic and cell biological tools to study this question in the nematode, C. elegans, which has a very simple nervous system containing only 302 neurons and approximately 6000 synapses.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Michael Simon We use genetic and biochemical approaches to study three areas of developmental biology; Planar cell polarity (PCP) in epithelial cells, control of cell shape, motility and the actin cytoskeleton by Src family protein tyrosine kinases, and control of cell fate specification by receptor tyrosine kinases.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Robert Simoni The nature of cellular membranes using a broad range of techniques, from molecular biology and biochemistry to cell biology. We continue to analyze the role of cholesterol in biological membranes, as well as the genetic mechanisms by which cholesterol production is regulated. This study has direct clinical relevance to the problems of atherosclerosis and heart disease.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Jan Skotheim A central aim of the burgeoning field of systems biology is to understand the principles governing genetic control networks. I believe finding the principles underlying genetic circuits will occur through detailed studies and then comparisons of several natural systems. Due to its extensive development as an experimental system, our favorite model, the budding yeast cell cycle, is poised to become central to this enterprise. A systematic understanding of biological control circuits should allow us to more readily discern the function of natural systems and aid us in engineering synthetic systems.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Tim Stearns The central question in our work is how cells accurately segregate their genome at each cell division. The work is focused on the centrosome, a unique organelle at the center of the cell that organizes the cytoskeleton and serves as a site for integration of cellular signals. We use the tools of cell biology, genetics, and biochemistry in systems ranging from yeast to human cells to understand how the centrosome duplicates once per cell cycle, and how centrosome defects are involved in the genome instability that is observed in many types of cancer. .CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Stuart Thompson Signal transduction mechanisms in neurons with the goal of better understanding how neurons process information. Signal cascades initiated by G-protein coupled receptors and egional specialization of function in neurons and the role that localized clusters of ion channels play in the processing of information by the cell.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Shripad Tuljapurkar Dynamics and evolution of human and natural populations. Sensitivity and extinction dynamics in the presence of disturbance, population aging and age structural transitions, evolution of senescence.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Peter Vitousek Nutrient cycling in tropical and temperate forests. Regulation of cycling of nitrogen, phosphorus, and several other nutrients by using chemical analysis of soil, water, and gas samples from field sites. Biological invasion by exotic species, and sources of elements during long-term soil and ecosystem development in the Hawaiian Islands.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Virginia Walbot Our laboratory studies the behavior of MuDR/Mu transposons of maize to answer fundamental questions about transposon regulation and plant development. Without a fixed body size, how do plant cells cease division and how are Mu element excisions restricted to the final cell divisions? Plants lack a germ line, but a few floral cells differentiate to undergo meiosis - why does Mu transposition outcome change in pre-meiotic cells?.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Bruce Baker Sex determination, sexual behavior, dosage compensation and imaginal disc development in Drosophila melanogaster, with the goal of understanding at a molecular level how these processes are brought about.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Carol Boggs We are exploring how environmental variation affects life history traits, population structure and dynamics, and species interactions in ecological and evolutionary time, using Lepidoptera. Current interests include (1) how resource allocation strategies interact with foraging and life history in variable environments to affect fitness and population dynamics; (2) the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of small populations, including population re-introductions; and (3) invasion biology, particularly the evolutionary and ecological effects of non-native species' invasion into co-evolved systems.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Allan Campbell Comparative molecular biology of DNA insertion by bacteriophage lambda and its relatives, analyzing the organization of the biotin operon in Escherichia coli, and the genetic control of related pathways. Phage integration is a model system for the catalysis and regulation of specific DNA rearrangements.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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David Epel How development takes place in the marine environment, especially how embryos resist the effects of such environmental stresses as ultraviolet radiation, pathogens and natural and man-made toxins. How can the oocyte or the few-celled embryo protect itself from pathogens such as bacteria, ultraviolet radiation, or the effects of toxins, both natural and manmade?CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Harold Mooney Harold Mooney has demonstrated that convergent evolution takes place in the properties of different ecosystems that are subject to comparable climates, and has pioneered in the study of the allocation of resources in plants. Research in his laboratory is currently centered on the study of the impact of enhanced CO2 on ecosystem structure and function.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Joan Roughgarden We study the relationship between evolutionary biology and ecology using a combination of theoretical ecology and field studies. We use mathematical descriptions of evolution of community structure and population dynamics and we study Anolis lizards in the Caribbean and barnacles in California.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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George Somero We study how changes in protein sequence and in the intracellular milieu in which protein function occurs enable organisms to succeed in diverse environments. By comparing homologous proteins from animals adapted to different temperatures, we have shown that only minor differences in habitat temperature are sufficient to favor evolutionary changes.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Ward Watt Developing evolutionary theory from mechanistic viewpoints. Using techniques ranging from biochemistry, DNA sequencing, and wind-tunnel flight biophysics to field ecology and mathematical population genetics, we study biochemical and physiological mechanisms of genetic variation, ecological niche structure as the source of natural-selective pressures, and the resulting patterns of evolution of metabolic organization.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Charles Yanofsky Studies are focused on two major problems: 1) Determining the features of the attenuation regulatory mechanism used by E. coli to control transcription of the degradative tryptophanase operon; 2) Determining the features of the transcriptional and translational regulatory mechanisms controlling expression of operons concerned with tryptophan biosynthesis in B. subtilis. Both studies are revealing novel features of gene regulation.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Kathryn Barton Shoot apical meristem (SAM) -formation of leaves and stems in plants. Identifying Arabidopsis mutant phenotypes in SAM function to determine genes involved in molecular and cellular processes of SAM development.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Joseph Berry Physiological means by which plants adapt to environmental stress and climactic change, and photosynthetic mechanisms used by higher plants and algaes to fix carbon dioxide.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Devaki Bhaya Research efforts focus on cyanobacteria, an ancient and environmentally relevant phylum of photosynthetic microorganisms. Currently, we are examining the genomic diversity of phototrophic microbial communities in extreme environments and their responses to stressors and phages. In parallel, we are developing bioinformatic and genetic tools for cyanobacteria. Another emphasis is dissecting the biochemical networks and modeling the complex signaling that govern social behavior such as phototaxis in microbes.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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José R. Dinneny Response of plant root systems to environmental stress; emphasis on developmental mechanismsCONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Daniel Fisher Theoretical research on the dynamics of evolutionary processes and the interplay between genomic and phenotypic changes, especially in microbes. And dynamics of cellular processes involving interactions between multiple proteins, including cellular oscillators and switches and cooperative phenomena arising from multiple molecular motors acting on actin or microtubules. |
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Arthur Grossman How photosynthetic organisms acclimate to their environment and adjust the physiology of the cell. Effects of light are studied in cyanobacteria. Effects of changes in nutrients such as sulphur and phosphorus are studied in mutant green algae and cyanobacteria which are unable to acclimate to nutrient limitation.| WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Martin Jonikas Photosynthesis provides energy for most life on Earth, and as humans increasingly change this planet it is essential that we understand this process and the organisms that perform it. Our lab aims to dramatically accelerate our understanding of photosynthesis by applying novel functional genomics strategies to the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardit. |
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Joseph Lipsick Our laboratory focuses on understanding the function of normal genes, which when mutated cause cancer. Current topics of interest include the function and evolution of the Myb oncogene family, the function and evolution of E2F transcriptional regulators and Rb tumor suppressors, and the epigenetic regulation of gene expression.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Jonathan Payne My research group studies the relationship between environmental change and biological evolution over geological timescales. We address this theme in two ways. First, we seek to discover mechanisms underlying mass extinction events and subsequent recovery of bodiversity and ecosystem function through field-based studies employing paleontological, sedimentary, and geochemical data. Second, we seek to discover longer term links between enviornmental change and evolutionary outcome in patterns of selectivity in extinction and origination of taxa and trends in body size and ecosystem structure through geological time through statistical analysis of large fossil databases. |
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Sue Rhee Our group is interested in how plants respond and adapt to environmental challenges such as drought. We are tackling this problem by building biological networks from large-scale data and computational modeling and testing the models using molecular genetic approaches at the bench. Current research in my group focuses on characterizing novel regulators of drought sensing and root architecture, analyzing genome-wide gene-association networks and building metabolic and membrane protein-protein interaction networks. We focus on the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana for most of our work, though we are expanding our efforts to building metabolic network of other plants.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Alfred Spormann Research interests in our lab are at the interface of fundamental metabolic processes of anaerobic microorganisms and their application in bioenergy, bioremediation, and human intestinal health.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Zhiyong Wang Steroid responses mediated by a receptor kinase in Arabidopsis thaliana using molecular genetics and proteomics.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Irving Weissman Developmental biology, self-renewal, homing and functions of the cells that make up blood-forming and immune systems.CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Paula V Welander My research group studies the biosynthesis and physiological function of “molecular fossils” or biomarkers in modern bacteria. Molecular signatures, such as steranes and hopanes, identified in ancient rocks have been used to reconstruct important events in the Earth’s past, such as the first appearance of major groups of organisms, the catastrophic loss of biodiversity and the evolution of cyanobacteria and oxygenic photosynthesis. Yet our understanding of the phylogenetic distribution and physiological function of most of these organic molecules in extant bacteria is quite limited. Our research utilizes a combination of bioinformatics, microbial genetics, physiology, and biochemistry to address three general questions that can be applied to any biomarker: 1) what is its phylogenetic distribution in modern bacteria? 2) what are its physiological roles in modern bacteria? 3) what is the evolutionary history of its biosynthetic pathway? |
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Wing Hung Wong We develop and enhance tools in data analysis, statistical inference, machine learning, Monte Carlo, stochastic process and differential equation, and use them to study problems in computational and systems biology. The major focus are 1)Microarray analysis 2)Cis-regulatory analysis and comparative genomics3)Statistical learning and computation.CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Daria Hekmat-Scafe Lecturer in Core Molecular Biology Laboratory (BIO 44X) and Core Plant Biology & Ecology & Evolution Laboratory (BIO 44Y). |
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Jamie Imam Lecturer in Core Molecular Biology (BIO 44X), Explorations in Stem Cell Biology (BIO 168), and The Cancer Problem (THINK 23). |
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Waheeda Khalfan Lecturer and Coordinator of the Biology Core Courses: Genetics, Biochemistry, and Molecular Biology (BIO 41); Cell Biology and Animal Physiology (BIO 42); and Plant Biology, Evolution, and Ecology (BIO 43).CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Matthew Knope Lecturer in Core Molecular Biology Laboratory (BIO 44X) and Core Plant Biology & Ecology & Evolution Laboratory (BIO 44Y). |
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Shyamala Malladi Senior Lecturer in Core Molecular Biology Laboratory (BIO 44X) and Core Plant Biology & Ecology & Evolution Laboratory (BIO 44Y).
CONTACT | | FACULTY PROFILE |
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Andrew Todhunter Lecturer in The Senior Reflection (BIO 196 A,B,C) and The Personal Essay in Biology (BIO 197WA). |
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James Watanabe Lecturer in Invertebrate Zoology (BIOHOPK 161H), Animal Diversity (BIOHOPK 154H), Core Plant Biology & Ecology & Evolution (BIOHOPK 43H), Core Plant Biology & Ecology & Evolution Lab (BIOHOPK 44Y), Experimental Design and Probability (BIOHOPK 174H), and Ecology & Conservation of Kelp Forest Communities (BIOHOPK 185H).CONTACT | WEBSITE | FACULTY PROFILE |
