Lauren earned her Ph.D. in Microbiology at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville in Dr. Alison Buchan’s lab, with Dr. Steen as a co-advisor. Her dissertation focused on microbial degradation of plant-derived carbon in the salt marshes of the southeastern United States. Since graduating in 2018, she completed a postdoctoral appointment at the Forsyth Institute in Boston where she studied how microbial interactions in the nasal microbiome influence Streptococcus pneumoniae and Staphylococcus aureus colonization. Lauren is currently the research scientist at 1CellBio where she works to develop and adapt ‘omics techniques to work in droplets on a single-cell scale.