Cheryl Y. Hayashi, Ph.D.

Hayashi is the provost of science at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She also works at the Richard Gilder Graduate School as a professor, as a curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology and as the Leon Hess Director of Comparative Biology Research. Previously, she was a professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside. Hayashi is an expert on spider silks, investigating the characteristics of these remarkable biological materials and their genomic basis. She earned her Ph.D. in biology from Yale University and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her cross-disciplinary work studying the structure, function and evolutionary genetics of spider silks.