Professor Katayoon “Katie” Dehesh knows all about planting and replanting roots — in biology and in life.
When Dehesh escaped from Iran more than 40 years ago, she had one single goal in mind: education. She loved learning and was always curious about the biological life that surrounded her world in Iran. But in 1980 when the Iran-Iraq war disrupted her freedom as a woman to study and work, she decided to leave the country.
Eventually she made it to the United States, teaching at various U.S. universities. In 2016 she came to UC Riverside as director of the Institute of Integrative Genome Biology. She is a distinguished professor and molecular biochemist whose lab primarily focuses on understanding how organism (mainly plants) respond to stress. Since her arrival to UCR, Dehesh has been going above and beyond to teach undergraduate and graduate students, and to remind them to live life without fear of going after their dreams. Her motto is “be powerful.”
For that, Dehesh is one of UC Riverside’s Bold Hearts. Brilliant Minds.