Speaker Bio: Dipti Nayak, Ph.D.

Dipti Nayak earned her Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Engineering from Delhi University in 2007 and a M.S. in Environmental Sciences and Engineering from Stanford University in 2009. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2014 from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. As a graduate student, Dipti studied the evolution of single-carbon metabolism in bacteria. From 2015 to 2019, she was Simons Foundation fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation and a Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology postdoctoral fellow with William W. Metcalf at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. At Illinois, she developed CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing tools for methanogenic archaea. In Fall 2019, she joined the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor in the Genetics, Genomics and Development division. Dipti is a recipient of the Beckman Young Investigator award, a 2020 Searle Scholar.