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Christopher Wallace, Ph.D.
Chris Wallace has been a professor in the Whitman Biology Department since 2000. In addition to collaborating with students in research, and he teaches Principles of Biology (Biol 111), and Neurobiology (Biol 320). His research focuses on how interactions with the environment stimulate changes in brain circuitry, and how experience-induced changes in synapses, glial cells and vasculature are coordinated. Before coming to Whitman, Wallace was a research professor at Oregon Health and Science University. As a postdoctoral fellow with Oswald Steward at the University of Virginia, he studied molecular changes that take place within stimulated neurons, e.g. mRNA transport into dendrites. In graduate school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he worked with Bill Greenough to identify brain changes that are induced when an animal is housed in a complex environment, and the mRNAs that are turned on by that experience.
Curriculum Vitae (pdf, 161 KB)
Ginger Withers, Ph.D.
Ginger Withers has been a professor in the Whitman College Biology Department since 2002. She teaches Principles of Biology (Biol 111) lab, and courses in Development and Neurobiology. Her research focuses on how neurons are built during development, and what kinds of structural abnormalities arise when development goes awry. Before coming to Whitman, she held a research appointment at Oregon Health and Science University. As a postdoctoral fellow, she studied neuron development in vitro with Gary Banker at the University of Virginia, and in graduate school at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with Professors Susan Fahrbach and Gene Robinson, she discovered changes in the honeybee brain that occur as a worker progresses through stages of the division of labor.
Curriculum Vitae (pdf, 116 KB)