Stanley Fields

Biosketch

Stanley Fields is Professor and Chair of the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington and holds the William H. Gates III Endowed Chair in Biomedical Sciences. He received his B.A. at Middlebury College in Middlebury, VT. He obtained his Ph.D. from Cambridge University and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, working with George Brownlee and Fred Sanger on RNA and DNA sequencing methods. His postdoctoral work on the yeast mating pathway was carried out with Ira Herskowitz at the University of California, San Francisco. Fields was a faculty member in the Department of Microbiology at Stony Brook University from 1985 to 1995, where he developed the yeast two-hybrid method to identify protein-protein interactions. He moved to the University of Washington in 1995.

Research Interests

The major focus of our research is the development and implementation of new technologies. Our motivation is that a novel technology can catalyze research across a spectrum of biological investigations, often leading to multiple applications beyond those initially envisioned. We have explored technologies that analyze the function and activities of DNA, RNA and proteins. Current projects include the use of high throughput DNA sequencing to read out protein activities, the application of dominant negative polypeptides and the identification of cis-acting elements that act in RNA and DNA sequences.