Cheryl Y. Hayashi

Cheryl Y. Hayashi is a biologist who specializes in the evolution and functional properties of spider silk. She is the Provost and Sr. Vice President for Science at the American Museum of Natural History, where she is a curator and professor in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology. She also serves as the Leon Hess Director of Comparative Biology Research. She was a graduate of Yale University, a professor at University California Riverside, and a 2007 MacArthur Fellow.

Education Hayashi graduated from Iolani High School in 1985 and was a member of the school's first co-educational class. She continued her studies at Yale University, gaining a Bachelor of Science in 1988, Master of Science in 1990, and a Master of Philosophy in 1993. becoming interested in spiders when she had the job of hand-feeding the professor's colony of tropical spiders.

She was awarded a PhD by Yale in 1996, with a dissertation on the systematics of spiders using ribosomal DNA.

Career After working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wyoming (1996-2001),

Awards She was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship Program in 2007.