Camilla Kao
PHD IN Chemical Engineering, Senior Faculty Administrator, Storyteller
The oldest of three children of immigrants from Taiwan, Camilla Kao was born in Midland, Michigan, and spent the latter years of her youth in Lake Jackson, Texas. Both towns were sites of the Dow Chemical Company, where her father worked for his entire career before retiring. Cammy and her brothers followed their father's footsteps by studying chemical engineering sequentially in college, the three of them at Rice University. Cammy diverged from the pattern of her family by studying biological topics for her doctoral and postdoctoral research, with Chaitan Khosla (1992 to 1997) and Patrick O. Brown (1997 to 2000), respectively, at Stanford. The combination of her undergraduate and graduate training in mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, and biology, and her professional experience as a Stanford faculty member of chemical engineering between 2000 and 2006, prepared her well for her current position years later as Senior Faculty Administrator in the Department of Biochemistry. In this capacity, Cammy assists the faculty of biochemistry in diverse roles that take advantage of her familiarity with science and with the demands of academia on Stanford faculty.