Billie J. Swalla

Professor Billie J. Swalla is Acting Director of Friday Harbor Laboratories and Professor of Biology at the University of Washington. Professor Swalla began her career at the University of Iowa, working on cartilage and muscle differentiation and limb patterning in chicken embryos with Professor Michael Solursh. A summer taking Embryology at the Marine Biological Laboratory changed her life and she moved to a Postdoc with Professor William R. Jeffery, working on tailed and tailless ascidians, and the evolution of chordates. Early in the 1990's she began working on molecular phylogenies of the deuterostomes and proposed a new hypothesis for a worm-like deuterostome ancestor in 2000. Molecular phylogenies led to her understanding the importance of hemichordates to understanding the evolution of chordates, and she began working on hemichordate evolution and development in 1997. Her lab continues to work on tunicate and hemichordate phylogenies, evolution and development, and chordate origins. In 2010, she began a new project studying ctenophore evolution and development with Professor Leonid Moroz from the University of Florida. Her lab currently uses transcriptomics and genomics to investigate the evolution of animal body plans.

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