Marvalee H. Wake

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Marvalee H. Wake, professor in the department of integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley, is an evolutionary morphologist particularly interested in the evolution of live-bearing modes of reproduction. She uses the multiple and diverse occurrences of such modes in amphibians (frogs, salamanders, and caecilians) as her empirical database for analysis of the variation and the commonalities for both parents and young in the evolution of viviparity.

While in residence at Radcliffe, she plans to pursue both theoretical and empirical research on the evolution of viviparity. She will confer with other scholars and examine specimens in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University to develop a more extensive database; and she will examine the numerous “evolutions” of different modes of live-bearing reproduction in amphibians. She will then analyze these data to study how homoplasty—multiple developments of similar characteristics in diverse taxa—arises mechanistically.

Wake received her BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Southern California. She has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the California Academy of Sciences. Wake is currently president of the International Union of Biological Sciences and of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. She is a member of the Smithsonian Science Commission, the American Institute of Biological Sciences board of directors, and the National Science Foundation bio Advisory Committee.

(Fall term)