School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 6,351-6,360 of 6,900 Results

  • Dr. Victoria Watson-Zink

    Dr. Victoria Watson-Zink

    Postdoctoral Scholar, Biology

    BioI am an evolutionary marine invertebrate biologist, and I use bioinformatics and high-throughput sequencing technologies (genomics and transcriptomics) to explore life-history evolution in terrestrial crabs.

    I completed my B.S. in Biological Sciences (concentration in Ecology and Evolution) at Cornell University in 2013 with academic and research honors. While there, I studied climate science, marine biology, and coral reef biodiversity via several internships/fellowships at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Indonesian Biodiversity Research Center in Bali, Indonesia, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

    After graduating, I worked for two years as a lab manager and research technician at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA, which is where I discovered my passion for understanding life-history evolution in terrestrial crabs. I began my PhD in Population Biology at UC Davis in 2015, and as a Fellow of both the NSF GRFP and the NSF EAPSI programs, I have traveled extensively across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to observe and collect genetic samples from several land crab species.

    As a disabled Black woman in evolution and ecology, I am also passionate about increasing, supporting, and retaining diversity of all kinds in STEM, and during my PhD, I served as the first Graduate Student Advisor to the Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the College of Biological Sciences at UC Davis. I graduated as the first Black PhD from my degree program, and was also awarded the Merton Love Award for Best Dissertation in Ecology and Evolution for my dissertation work.

    I am now a postdoc at Stanford University as a joint Stanford Science Fellow/NSF PRFB Fellow and hope to one day launch my own research lab studying major evolutionary transitions.

  • Ward Watt

    Ward Watt

    Professor of Biology, Emeritus

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEvolutionary adaptive mechanisms, molecules to ecosystems

  • Robert Waymouth

    Robert Waymouth

    Robert Eckles Swain Professor of Chemistry and Professor, by courtesy, of Chemical Engineering

    BioRobert Eckles Swain Professor in Chemistry Robert Waymouth investigates new catalytic strategies to create useful new molecules, including bioactive polymers, synthetic fuels, and sustainable plastics. In one such breakthrough, Professor Waymouth and Professor Wender developed a new class of gene delivery agents.

    Born in 1960 in Warner Robins, Georgia, Robert Waymouth studied chemistry and mathematics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia (B.S. and B.A., respectively, both summa cum laude, 1982). He developed an interest in synthetic and mechanistic organometallic chemistry during his doctoral studies in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology under Professor R.H. Grubbs (Ph.D., 1987). His postdoctoral research with Professor Piero Pino at the Institut fur Polymere, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, focused on catalytic hydrogenation with chiral metallocene catalysts. He joined the Stanford University faculty as assistant professor in 1988, becoming full professor in 1997 and in 2000 the Robert Eckles Swain Professor of Chemistry.

    Today, the Waymouth Group applies mechanistic principles to develop new concepts in catalysis, with particular focus on the development of organometallic and organic catalysts for the synthesis of complex macromolecular architectures. In organometallic catalysis, the group devised a highly selective alcohol oxidation catalyst that selectively oxidizes unprotected polyols and carbohydrates to alpha-hyroxyketones. In collaboration with Dr. James Hedrick of IBM, we have developed a platform of highly active organic catalysts and continuous flow reactors that provide access to polymer architectures that are difficult to access by conventional approaches.

    The Waymouth group has devised selective organocatalytic strategies for the synthesis of functional degradable polymers and oligomers that function as "molecular transporters" to deliver genes, drugs and probes into cells and live animals. These advances led to the joint discovery with the Wender group of a general, safe, and remarkably effective concept for RNA delivery based on a new class of synthetic cationic materials, Charge-Altering Releasable Transporters (CARTs). This technology has been shown to be effective for mRNA based cancer vaccines.