Dr. Trisha Davis, University of Washington
Trisha N. Davis received her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Biology from the University of California at Santa Cruz where she completed a senior thesis with honors working with Dr. James Clark and Dr. Todd Wipke. Her thesis was entitled “An Interactive Computer Program for Building and Examining Peptides.” She completed a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University working with Dr. John Cronan on a thesis entitled “Analysis of the Lipid-containing Bacteriophage PR4.” Her postdoctoral research with Dr. Jeremy Thorner at UC Berkeley focused on calmodulin and was sponsored by the Anna Fuller Fund and the National Cancer Institute. She has been a professor at the University of Washington for 24 years and was promoted to Professor of Biochemistry in 2001. Her research focuses on a molecular analysis of chromosome segregation. She has published 17 papers in this area in the last five years. She was a Visiting Scientist and Humboldt Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in 2008-2009. In 2001, she became the director of the Yeast Resource Center, which is a Biomedical Technology Research Center sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. The Yeast Resource Center (YRC) is a multidisciplinary center that develops new technologies to discover the functional and structural consequences of protein variation. The YRC includes eight labs (Davis, Baker, Dunham, Fields, MacCoss, Muller, Noble and Yates). As new technologies are developed, the YRC collaborates widely (approximately 150 collaborators each year) to disseminate these technologies. The collaborations and advances in technology yield approximately 45 papers each year.