About

William P. Dwyer

Biology PhD Candidate in the Dinneny Lab @ Stanford
Knight-Hennessy Scholar (2023), NIH Cell & Molecular Biology Trainee (2024)
Researcher @ SLAC National Accelerator Facility, Cryo-EM Division

Previously: Postbac in the Rhee Lab @ Carnegie Institution for Science
B.A. in Biochemistry @ Vassar College (2020)

Helloo00 and thank you for reading through my nerd page. Here's a little about me: I was raised in France, where I spent my childhood making bows out of bamboo and mixing hydrochloric acid with tin foil in my family's garage (spoiler: it goes boom). Chemistry was my first love. All I'll say here is it was way too easy for a kid to buy pure beryllium on Ebay. Biology corrupted me during my undergrad in New York, first by necessity (pre-med) and later by pure wonder (proteins?!). After a brief excursion into biomedical research, I fell in love with plants and their alien bodies. Three writers are to blame: Richard Powers, Hope Jahren, Robin Wall Kimmerer. I followed my newfound interest to (metaphorically) greener pastures in California where I trained as a plant biologist first with Seung Yon Rhee and currently with José Dinneny. My interests are at the interface of biotic and abiotic systems, specifically: how do cells/tissues/organisms perceive their environment? I use the root—an innately sensitive organ—as a system to understand how plants sense their surroundings and regulate their development as the world around them changes.

I enjoy side-quests and meandering through branches of science. My lifelong aspiration is to resolve some of nature's magic and share it through storytelling. I hope this page can be a starting point for that.