Lara Ferry, Ph.D.

Education:

• B.S., Biology, Cal Poly State University-San Luis Obispo
• M.S., Marine Science, San Francisco State University
• Ph.D., Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine
• Postdoctoral Associate, Center for Population Biology and Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California-Davis

Background:

Lara Ferry is the in inaugural Vice President and Chief Research Innovation Officer and a Professor of Biology at OU. In her administrative role, she is tasked with leveraging her prior experiences to bring commercialization, strategic engagement, partnerships, and venture development together under one leader so that discoveries at OU move faster into real-world use and economic impact across Oklahoma. She served previously as the Vice President for Research at Arizona State University where she developed and implemented strategies to expand and diversify funding opportunities and portfolios, with a particular emphasis on supporting inter- and multidisciplinary research. In both her present and former roles, she collaborates closely with faculty and academic units to advance research programs and initiatives to achieve the university’s research goals. She also works to support and grow partnerships that help the university’s faculty and enhance ASU’s impact in research—with other institutions, with community, with donors, and with industry—to deliver meaningful outcomes to our region, our nation, and internationally..

Dr. Ferry is broadly trained as a comparative physiologist and ecophysiologist, and her research has focused largely on aquatic and marine organisms. This research is centered on questions relating to the evolution of jaws and their function in the aquatic realm, as well as the performance of skeletal materials such as cartilage.

Fields of Specialization: Biology, Marine Science, Ecology, Physiology, Ecophysiology, Biomechanics, Biomaterials