Marvalee Hendricks was born in Orange, California on July 31, 1939.[3] She attended the University of Southern California (USC), earning a B.A. 1961; M.S. in 1964; and completing her Ph.D. in 1968 under herpetologist Jay Savage.[4] While at USC she met and married biologist David B. Wake and gave birth to a son. Wake became assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and later she and her husband moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where David assumed directorship of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and Marvalee became a professor. She was rapidly promoted, eventually assuming the chair of the Department of Zoology and its successor, the Department of Integrative Biology.[1] She nominally retired as professor in 2003, but remained active in research and since 2004 has held the position of Professor of the Graduate School at UC Berkeley.[1][4]
Wake is known as an expert in caecilians—a relatively little-known group of limbless amphibians—and her research has included the developmental biology, evolution, reproduction, and anatomy of these creatures.[5][6] Her research has been credited with stimulating renewed world-wide interest in the group which has historically received little research.[1] In her doctoral dissertation and a series of early papers she explored comparative aspects of caecilian reproductive anatomy, and in 1972 co-described the first evidence of caecilians in the fossil record.[7] She is also recognized for her contributions towards the field of vertebrate morphology. Biologist Brian K. Hall writes: "Consistently, passionately and effectively, Marvalee Wake has advocated the teaching of morphology as a multifaceted modern science that informs evolutionary biology and evolutionary theory, and is foundational to integrative biology."[2]: 271 She has formally collaborated with her husband—an expert in salamanders—since 1975, although the two maintain separate labs and graduate students.[8]
Wake has published or co-published over 200 journal articles and book chapters, edited a revision of the textbook Hyman's Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy (originally written by Libbie H. Hyman), and co-edited a general biology textbook (Biology, 1979) as well as the scholarly book The Origin and Evolution of Larval Forms (1999).[1]
Wake has served as advisor to 17 doctoral students and 15 post-doctoral students. In 2014 she received the Henry S. Fitch Award for Excellence in Herpetology from the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.[6]
