Cheryl Hayashi

Cheryl Y. Hayashi is a Hawaii-born biologist who is curator, professor, and Director of Comparative Biology Research at the American Museum of Natural History. Hayashi specializes in the genetic structure of spider silk. A Yale alumnus, she was previously a professor at University California Riverside, and was a 2007 MacArthur Fellow.

Education
Hayashi is a biologist who graduated from Iolani School in 1985, and was a member of the school's first co-educational class.  She continued her studies at Yale University, gaining a Bachelor of Science in 1988, Master of Science in 1990, and a Master of Philosophy in 1993. She worked with Catherine Craig, including field work in Panama, becoming interested in spiders when she had the job of hand-feeding the professor's colony of tropical spiders.

She was awarded a PhD in 1996, with a dissertation on spiders' ribosomal DNA.

Career
After working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wyoming (1996-2001), Hayashi was a professor at UC Riverside from 2001 to the end of 2016.

Her UC Riverside laboratory's work characterized spiders in the spidroin gene family, including how silk is encoded and studying the basis of molecular diversity in spiders. A variety of techniques, including whole-gene cloning, genomics, biochemistry, and biomechanics, were used to study the evolution of spider silk. Hayashi worked with engineers and biomechanics to understand spider silk, and to develop biomaterials based on spider genetic information.

Hayashi was a speaker at TED 2010 Conference. She became curator, professor and Leon Hess Director of Comparative Biology Research at the American Museum of Natural History in January 2017.

Awards
She was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship Program in 2007.

References

External links
 "TED 2010 | Cheryl Hayashi: Smooth — and Strong — as Silk", Wired, Kim Zetter, February 10, 2010
 

Category:Living people
Category:Year of birth missing (living people)
Category:Yale University alumni
Category:University of California, Riverside faculty
Category:MacArthur Fellows
Category:Women biologists
Category:21st-century American biologists