The People, History  and Facilities of the Department of Developmental Biology at Stanford

The Department was founded in 1989 in recognition of the explosive growth in understanding the molecular biology of development, and in recognition of its potential impact on modern medical practice.
 
The field of developmental biology is fundamentally integrative. In trying to understand how cells coordinate their activities to form a working organism we employ genetics, genomics, imaging, biochemistry, transgenesis, injection, optical tweezers, clinical studies, and especially that most powerful approach of all: discussion. The Department includes fourteen laboratory groups, most of them in the Beckman Center building.
 
 
The Department is home to about 60 graduate students and 80 postdoctoral fellows. These people are the key to the Department's success; they take the research in new directions, debate approaches and ideas, and bring an enormous amount of wisdom and experience to the labs.

We also have a superb financial, administrative, and scientific staff that keeps the Department running smoothly. In order to promote learning and transfer of experience and expertise, all facilities and instruments are shared and many of the department rooms contain a mixture of people from different labs. Interactions between the laboratories and departments are promoted by joint departmental recreation events, such as the DB/genetics baseball game shown below. The Department is amply equipped with modern equipment such as confocal and other types of microscopes, microarray facilities, robotics, and computer systems. Within our building are microchemical and sequencing facilities, an imaging center that has numerous microscopes and offers courses in their use, an extensive animal facility, a cell sorter facility run by the people who invented cell sorters, and a new electron microscope facility under construction that is to be run by our department. A major new center for Mass Spectrometry is partly operational and is about to be greatly expanded.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

We are within minutes of about fifty other Stanford labs that collectively form the developmental biology community at Stanford. Close contact and friendship among the labs within the department and in other departments are promoted by frequent shared events. Each year we hold a Department retreat, usually at a conference center at Monterey Bay (Asilomar) or in the Sierra Nevada mountains. There are frequent meetings for presentations of research and for journal clubs, such as the Human Genetics journal club, "On the Fly" (Drosophila research), and many others. The Frontiers in Developmental Biology talks, held on Wednesdays every few weeks, bring distinguished scientists to Stanford; the speakers always meet with students and postdoctoral fellows after the talks. Stanford faculty with interests in developmental biology, from about a dozen different departments, meet weekly at lunch to discuss research projects in one of the labs. We teach the major graduate student course in Developmental Biology (DB210), which is open to all graduate students. We teach the entire incoming medical student class a course called Development and Disease Mechanisms (DB206). Other courses include Microbial Development (DB211) and Mammalian Developmental (DB217). Several of our faculty hold appointments in other departments such as Genetics, Pathology, Medicine, or Biochemistry, forming additional links. Some faculty are associated with Programs in Neuroscience, Biophysics, or Cancer Biology or the Montrey
Bay Aquarium