Marvalee Wake

Marvalee H. Wake is a Professor of the Graduate School, Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley.

She is an evolutionary biologist, whose research emphasizes examination of the morphology of vertebrates, including development and function, to assess such questions as how similarity in distantly related lineages (homoplasy) arises and is maintained, how the loss of structural components arises and affects lineage diversification, how derived modes of reproduction evolve, and how morphological components are structurally, developmentally, and functionally integrated. She focuses on amphibians, encompassing multiple levels of the hierarchy of biological organization.

She also examines biodiversity science, using amphibians as exemplars. She is a Fellow of American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the California Academy of Sciences, the Linnaean Society, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. She was awarded California Academy of Sciences Fellows’ Medal in 2010; the IUBS Award in 2012, and the Henry Fitch Award for Excellence in Herpetology in 2014.

She is a Past President of the American Society for Ichthyology and Herpetology, the World Congress of Herpetology, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, the American Institute for Biological Sciences, and the International Society for Vertebrate Morphology, as well as IUBS.