Diane C. Shakes

Diane Shakes is a Professor of Biology at the College of William and Mary. After completing her undergraduate studies at Pomona College, she did her Ph.D. studies at Johns Hopkins studying spermatogenesis in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans with Sam Ward. After a postdoc with Ken Kemphues at Cornell studying the establishment of cell polarity during early C. elegans embryogenesis, she accepted a faculty position at the University of Houston. In 1995, she moved to Virginia to join the faculty of the Biology Department at The College of William and Mary.

Much of Dr. Shakes’ work has explored the interplay between the meiotic cell cycle and the developmental programs of sperm and oocyte development in C. elegans. More recently, she has expanded her studies to explore how evolutionary modifications to these programs support dramatically skewed sex ratios in the nematode genus Auanema.