Biography

Noah Whiteman is a/an Associate Professor in the University Of California department at University Of California

University of California Berkeley - Biology

Associate Professor, Integrative Biology at University of California, Berkeley
Noah
Whiteman
San Francisco Bay Area
My laboratory studies the genetic basis of adaptations that arise from species interactions. We focus on host-parasite interactions and use plants as models hosts and herbivorous insects as model parasites. Think of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We use genome engineering to isolate particular mutations in genes that are candidates for adaptive phenotypes, using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and the plant Arabidopsis thaliana as in vivo systems. Lately, we have been studying how insects cope with plant toxins and how insects defend themselves against parasitoid wasps.

See our latest research on how we used CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing to understand how the monarch butterfly evolved to be resistant to milkweed toxins it stores in its body:
http://rdcu.be/bSMr3

Carl Zimmer’s story about it in the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/science/monarch-butterflies-milkweed.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

My blog about it:
http://www.noahwhiteman.org/monarch-fly.html

Goals/Interests as an educator: Train creative, kind, passionate and erudite skeptics. Deep interest in engagement with students, and the public, on evolutionary biology and science as a way of knowing. Sharing my failures and successes as an LGBT first-generation college student who grew up in rural, northeastern Minnesota, deep in the Sax-Zim bog: science illuminated a path that led me to the Galápagos Islands and Argentina for my dissertation on hawks and their parasites, Harvard University for my postdoctoral research in genomics and molecular biology and ultimately, my current position at UC-Berkeley where we use genome engineering to study the genetic basis of adaptation.

See my lab website: www.noahwhiteman.org for more details.