Lauren Saunders
Lauren Saunders
Position:
PostDoc
Lauren grew up near Chicago and did her undergraduate studies at St. Olaf College, where she fell in love with developmental biology. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she studied how Thyroid Hormone signaling controls zebrafish pigment pattern formation in Dave Parichy's lab. She then stayed in Seattle to do a postdoc with Cole Trapnell in the Genome Sciences Department, working on high throughput single cell transcriptomics approaches to quantify the effects of genetic perturbations in zebrafish embryos. Lauren is broadly interested in understanding stem cell plasticity during development and evolution through the lens of single cell genomics. When she's not in the lab, you might find her hiking with her Australian shepherd, Eila, trying a new recipe, or in the pottery studio.
Lauren will be starting her own lab as a TT junior professor at the Center for Organismal Studies at Heidelberg University in January 2024.