Lauren receives the Frank Beach Award

We are delighted to name Dr. Lauren O’Connell the 2017 winner of The Frank A. Beach Award in Behavioral Neuroendocrinology. Lauren earned her B.S. from Cornell University prior to joining the Molecular and Cellular Biology Program at UT Austin as a graduate student. Following her initial work with Dr. David Crews, Lauren began working with Dr. Hans Hofmann’s group on the evolution of the social behavioral network across vertebrate species. In her graduate work she uncovered circuitry in cichlid fish homologous to the mammalian social behavior network. In addition, she performed a comprehensive evolutionary reconstruction of the vertebrate social decision-making network, comparing neurochemical gene expression profiles across twelve fore- and midbrain regions in 88 species, revealing remarkable conservation and culminating in a Sciencepaper. Following her PhD at UT Austin, Lauren was awarded a 5-Year Bauer fellowship to pursue independent research at Harvard’s FAS Center for Systems Biology. Here she developed an independent line of work on the eco-toxicology and the evolution of paternal care in poison dart frogs. She has recently joined the Department of Biology at Stanford University as an Assistant Professor.