About Candace Low

Dr. Candace Low is interested in the evolution of behavioral and social strategies and impacts on ecological dynamics. Her areas of expertise are experimental design and statistics, plant-herbivore-enemy systems, and the economics of interactions (game theory and evolution). She teaches: Biometry, Ecology, Evolution, and Data Science. She has served as the Advisor for the SFSU Student Chapter of the Wildlife Society from 2016-2022 and as a Financial Literacy Coach through the REACH program in the Ethnic Studies Department in 2023. She is currently the departmental representative for the Lecturer Faculty in Biology with the California Faculty Association, on the steering committee of the Equity for Lecturer Faculty subcommittee, the Education Chair on the board of the California Native Plant Society-Yerba Buena, and a member of the steering committee for the Reimagining San Francisco Alliance (California Academy of Sciences).

Dr. Low was the first of her family born in the U.S., in the historic Chinese Hospital in Chinatown, San Francisco -- when the maternity ward was just a small 4-room suite (and happens to be the same place where Bruce Lee was born!) She's proud to be a native San Franciscan and to share in the city's rich Asian American heritage. Both of her parents died before she started college at UC Berkeley, but she persevered independently and earned a bachelor's degree in Integrative Biology, fulfilling her parent's hope that she would (be the first) go to college. She later earned a master's degree in Conservation Biology at SF State, and then a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Barbara. There she pioneered a research program that she continued to develop as PI with a prestigious NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology (to study theoretical ecology at Cornell University). She returned to SF State in 2013 to serve her community, as outlined by the CSU Chancellor's Doctoral Incentive Program (CDIP) which had been awarded to her after completion of her MA 13 years prior. She continues to advance the ideals of scholarship, environmental- and social justice.