Deborah M. Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University. She studies how ant colonies work without central control using networks of simple interactions, and how these networks evolve in relation to changing environments. She received her PhD from Duke University, then joined the Harvard Society of Fellows, and did postdoctoral research at Oxford and the University of London before joining the Stanford faculty in 1991. Projects include a long-term study of a population of harvester ant colonies in Arizona, studies of the invasive Argentine ant in northern California, arboreal ant trail networks and ant-plant mutualisms in Central America.