Evolutionary Biologist
University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus
Maydianne Andrade has the enviable job of studying cannibalistic spiders. She was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and immigrated with her parents to Vancouver, Canada, when she was 3 years old. She earned a BSc from Simon Fraser University and an MSc at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. She then moved to the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University from which she received a PhD in 2000. She is now Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, where she uses her spiders as models for understanding the evolution of mating behavior.
Andrade was picked to be one of Popular Science magazine’s 2005 Brilliant 10. She has also been the recipient of the Outstanding New Investigator Award (Animal Behavior Society), the Pitelka Award for Excellence in Research (International Society for Behavioral Ecology), and a Premier’s Research Excellence Award (Government on Ontario).