Associate Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology
Molecular & Cell Biology
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I was born and raised in rural Iowa and continue to help manage my family’s farm, which was recognized in 2010 as an Iowa Heritage Farm. I attended Gustavus Adolphus College, where and earned a B.A. in Chemistry and minored in Computer Science. In 2007 I received a Ph.D. from UCSF working on membrane protein structure determination with Robert Stroud. From 2007 to 2011, I was a Life Sciences Research...
I am an evolutionary biologist broadly interested in the ecology, evolution, and genomics of adaptive radiation in fishes. My lab uses field experiments, natural history, population genomics, behavioral ecology, functional morphology, quantitative and functional genetics, and phylogenetic methods to dissect this process at the mesoevolutionary scale in rapid radiations of three or more species.
For full research description, please visit Christopher's Faculty Profile.
I was an MCB major at the University of Arizona, then pursued a PhD in virology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, followed by a postdoc in virology at UCSF. I've been a faculty member at UC Berkeley since 2006, became an HHMI investigator in 2015, and am currently Associate Chair of Plant & Microbial Biology. My research is centered on virus-host interactions that influence gene expression, primarily in the context of herpesvirus infection. This includes viral repurposing and altering of cellular gene regulation machinery to promote virus replication, as well as cellular...
My primary interest is understanding how organisms respond developmentally to environmental signals, and how and why these responses evolve as populations have adapted or will adapt to changing environmental conditions. I run a small to medium sized lab primarily funded by NSF grants, and to gain integrative understanding of our chosen foci, our work embraces a wide range of techniques from detailed studies of molecular mechanisms to genomic studies of archaeological samples to large field experiments. I started at UCB in January 2016 after 3.5 years as junior faculty at UVA, and I...
