Victoria Watson-Zink, Ph.D. ’22, a postdoctoral evolutionary marine biologist, received the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Hanna H. Gray Fellowship last month. This year’s fellowship supports the transition of 25 early-career scientists to leading labs and becoming tenured faculty.

Watson-Zink completed her Ph.D. at UC Davis, where her research focused on the genomic and physiological changes that allow crabs to transition to land. Her work examines the evolutionary processes that have enabled certain crab species to become terrestrial, a transition that has occurred multiple times throughout Earth's history.

Watson-Zink’s academic path began with an undergraduate degree at Cornell University. She then took two gap years, working at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, where she was a lab manager for Professor Jennifer Taylor. During this time, Watson-Zink learned about the biomechanics that allow crabs to live on land and gained an interest in them. “I was just really fascinated because before I had met her, I didn't even know that [land crabs] were a thing,” she said.

After her gap years, she enrolled at UC Davis, joining the Population Biology Graduate Group. At UC Davis, she used genomics and a physiological lens to study the transition of crabs to land. Watson-Zink was also taught as a course TA for an invertebrate zoology class, which she said was a very memorable experience. “We would take the undergrads out into the field and then we would be able to have these conversations about their biology. It was an exciting class, and I really enjoyed that,” she said.

Watson-Zink has been able to continue teaching, and now, as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, she focuses on the reproductive biology and developmental processes of terrestrial crabs, investigating the evolution of these frameworks. “My research is really trying to understand how these processes have changed in terrestrial crabs as they move onto land,” she said. “I do a lot of working with the crabs. They’re really cute.”

The fellowship provides $1.5 million in financial support over up to eight years.

Watson-Zink has also been able to connect to fellow scientists in the HHMI network through the program and is planning to attend its annual retreat. “We all get to go out and share our science with each other. I’m really excited to do that later in the summer,” she said.

The achievement has also been a great reward for challenges in her academic career. “There’s a lot of trying and failing, but every failure gets me a little further. It's also exciting to be right at the cutting edge,” she said. Additionally, she faced personal hardships during her graduate studies, including the loss of family members and the diagnosis of chronic illness. These experiences, she said, have changed how she has navigated her academic career. “I’m just trying to pace myself. Oftentimes I need to reset and focus on what I found important about my work to help me keep going,” she said.

Looking ahead, Watson-Zink said she is excited about continuing her work on crab development and expanding her research into linking genetic functions with animal behavior. “I'm very optimistic about the project I'm working on,” she said, adding that she hopes to return to fieldwork to deepen her understanding of and connection to the animals she studies. “My work is really rooted in the natural history of the animals, and I really want to make sure that that continues moving forward,” she said.