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When faculty member Pol ly Fordyce was 6, she liked to take a journey across 40 orders of magnitude. Her father, who worked for NASA at the time, would take her to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where together they would watch a 1977 short film called Powers of Ten. The film begins with a couple having a picnic at a lakeside park in Chicago. An overhead view zooms out so that every 10 seconds, the scene appears another 10 times farther away from the starting point. The viewer is swept from the park to the country, to the blues and greens of Earth seen from space, and then out beyond the galaxy. Then the scene zooms back in and travels even deeper, into cells, inside a protein and finally to an atom — a range of 40 orders of magnitude. Fordyce, PhD, an assistant professor of genetics and of bioengineering, describes her younger self as a dorky kid who preferred staying inside during recess solving math problems to facing the indignities of being picked last for sports. She liked to think about different length scales at an early age. Now, she delves deep into the body to help researchers understand disease. She develops new technology to accelerate the process of studying proteins. In the past, researchers were unable to predict which molecules interacted with which proteins in the body, and so they had to test the possibilities one by one. Today, Fordyce’s technology allows them to predict and narrow down the number of targets they need to test. “We don’t study specific diseases; we try to make tools that we can apply toward understanding many different diseases,” said Fordyce, who is also a member of Stanford Bio-X and Stanford ChEM-H.