Noah Whiteman is a lot of things. He’s a naturalist — he grew up in rural Minnesota, where his dad taught him to hunt with a bow and arrow and make a fire in the rain. He’s an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley, the first in his family to go to college. He’s a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, author of the 2023 book Most Delicious Poison and recipient of the 2025 Genetics Society of America Medal. He’s also a husband, married to a highly creative man he met just after arriving in Berkeley a decade ago.
When people think about LGBTQ Pride Month and what it means, this is the...
I am an immunologist and microbiologist who works on bacterial infection. I received my PhD from UCSF in 2006 under the mentorship of Jeff Cox. My work focused on using genetic approaches to identify virulence factors in the bacterial pathogen M. tuberculosis. I then received postdoctoral training at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, where I explored chemical biological approaches to identifying novel treatments for tuberculosis. I started my lab at Cal in 2012. My research here has focused on understanding protective immunity to Mtb at a mechanistic level using the mouse model of...
Sensation of environmental stimuli, thought, learning, memory, and other aspects of neuronal communication, hormone secretion and movement all rely on cellular electrical signals. We study life’s electrical system from a molecular and biophysical perspective. The focus of the laboratory is on ion channels, transporters and their regulatory complexes that form gated pathways for ionic traffic across cell membranes. We aim to discover how these membrane proteins work at a detailed mechanistic level and what they do in a...
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...
After going to Cal as an undergrad I got my PhD at the University of Utah in 2004. I lived in Peru for much of my PhD work, conducting field work near Iquitos Peru, in some of the most species-rich forests on earth. I studied the evolution of habitat specialization by plants to different soils and the role of herbivores and plant defenses in influencing this process. I continued this work for my postdoc at the University of Michigan Society of Fellows and then was hired by UC Berkeley in 2007. I have continued my work on tropical diversity and also have built up a research program the...
The Inclusive Faculty Mentorship (IFM) is a three year pilot program funded in part by the