In May 2014, Provost Robert Lieberman appointed Beverly Wendland, PhD, as interim dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. On February 12, 2015, Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels announced that the executive committee of the board of trustees had approved his recommendation that Dr. Wendland be appointed the new James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School.
A Johns Hopkins faculty member since 1998, Dr. Wendland has a strong knowledge of the Krieger School and its operations. She became chair of the Department of Biology in 2009, leading faculty, staff, and students during a period of renewal. She also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Biophysics.
Dr. Wendland earned her bachelor’s degree in bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego, and her doctoral degree in neurosciences from Stanford University. She joined the Department of Biology at Johns Hopkins after completing her postdoctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego.
A recipient of funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, Dr. Wendland and her team study fundamental cellular processes using yeast cells as a simple model system. Discoveries about how yeast cell function can also teach us about human diseases, such as neurodegenerative diseases or cancer. Her lab’s work may ultimately identify new targets for treatments, such as enhanced delivery of gene therapies.
In 2015, she was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for her groundbreaking studies on the genetic, molecular, biochemical, and biophysical mechanisms underlying endocytosis.
Throughout her tenure at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Wendland has supported graduate and undergraduate students, serving as their mentor and a collaborator. An advocate for training future scientists to engage the power of interdisciplinary research, she was a member of the lab advisory committee during the construction of the new Undergraduate Teaching Laboratories, designed to foster collaboration across Homewood’s scientific community. Dr. Wendland was also a member of the Krieger School’s advisory committee on the status of women.