Joan E. Strassmann

Joan E. Strassmann is Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. She earned a B.S. in zoology from the University of Michigan with distinction and honors in zoology in 1974 (and a Hopwood Award for undergraduate fiction) and a Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1979. Her dissertation research explored theories of social behavior and evolution using individually marked social wasps in wild colonies. In 1980 she joined the faculty at Rice University, eventually becoming department chair and Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor in Natural Sciences in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. In 2011 Strassmann and her husband and collaborator, Spencer T. Olin Professor David C. Queller, joined the Biology Department of Washington University in St. Louis.

            Strassmann and Queller collaborated on many studies of social insects at field sites in Venezuela, Brazil, and Italy.  In particular they explored the tension between conflict and cooperation in families. They pioneered molecular methods to understand specifics of genetic structure underlying the complex social systems of social insects.  In 2000, they switched to a new system, the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum, which has both family level altruism and mutualisms with bacteria. Their current research involves this system and others that will transform our understanding of what it means to be an organism. Their current research explores life cycles, kin recognition, and organismality at genetic, behavioral, and evolutionary levels.

Professor Strassmann has published over 180 articles.  She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2013). She has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2004), was elected a Fellow of the Animal Behavior Society (2002), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2004), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008), and served as president of the Animal Behavior Society (2012). She writes a popular blog on the intricacies of academia (http://sociobiology.wordpress.com) and is an award winning teacher who has her students write for Wikipedia.

            Strassmann and Queller have three children: Anna, Daniel, and Philip.