Polly Morrell Fordyce PhD

Polly Fordyce is an Assistant Professor of Genetics and Bioengineering and a fellow of the ChEM-H Institute at Stanford, where her laboratory focuses on developing and applying new microfluidic platforms for quantitative, high-throughput biophysics and biochemistry.

She graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with undergraduate degrees in physics and biology before moving to Stanford University, where she earned a Ph.D. in physics for work with Professor Steve Block developing instrumentation and assays for single-molecule studies of kinesin motor proteins. For her postdoctoral research, she worked with Professor Joe DeRisi to develop a new microfluidic platform for understanding how transcription factors recognize and bind their DNA targets as well as a new technology for bead-based multiplexing.

She is the recipient of a number of awards, including an NIH New Innovator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, a McCormick and Gabilan Fellowship, an NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00), and a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellowship, and was recently named a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator.