Billie J. Swalla

Billie Swalla earned her Bachelor of Science in Zoology from the University of Iowa in 1980. She earned a Master of Science there, with a thesis on chicken egg development in 1983. She then took an Embryology course at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She earned her PhD in Biology, also at Iowa, on chicken egg development in 1988. She became a Post-Doctoral Fellow with William R. Jeffery studying gene expression during ascidian egg development. In 1988, Swalla and Jeffery traveled to the Station Biologique in Roscoff, France, to study the evolution and development of ascidians. Shortly after, Swalla won a Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the National Institutes of Health to study developmental biology at the Bodega Marine Laboratory at the University of California.

In 1994, Swalla worked as an assistant professor of Biology at Vanderbilt University for three years. She then worked as an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University from 1997 to 1999 before settling at the University of Washington.