Polly Fordyce

Biography

Polly Fordyce is an Assistant Professor in the Genetics Department at Stanford, as well as a Faculty Fellow in ChEM-H. Her lab will focus on using microfluidic tools to make quantitative measurements of transcription factor specificity and developing new tools to allow the creation of large peptide and combinatorial chemistry libraries. Polly earned her PhD in the Physics Department at Stanford for single-molecule studies of kinesin family proteins in Steve Block's laboratory. As a postdoctoral fellow, she worked in Joe DeRisi's laboratory at UCSF developing microfluidic tools for characterizing transcription factor binding and using them to characterize proteins from both yeast and humans. She is starting her own lab at Stanford in September 2014.

Research Interest

The Fordyce Lab is focused on developing new instrumentation and assays for making quantitative, systems-scale biophysical measurements of molecular interactions. Current research in the lab is focused on two main areas: using microfluidic tools we have developed to build ground-up quantitative models of how gene expression is regulated, and developing new tools to transform how scientists explore protein-protein interactions.