Rate My Professor Dipti Nayak

Dipti Nayak is an Assistant Professor of Genetics, Genomics, Evolution, and Development in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the faculty in July 2019. Nayak received her PhD from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University in 2014. From 2015 to 2019, she served as a Simons Foundation Fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation and Carl R. Woese Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Her research focuses on the physiology and evolution of Archaea, with particular emphasis on methanogenic archaea that produce and consume methane. The Nayak lab develops genetic, genomic, and biochemical tools for methanogenic archaea of the genus Methanosarcina to investigate their metabolism, cell biology, and evolutionary biology. Nayak has received the Beckman Young Investigator Award, the Searle Scholars Award, the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, a Rose Hills Innovator Grant, and the Simons Foundation Early Career Investigator in Marine Microbial Ecology and Evolution award.