Lab Members
Principal Investigator
Chris has been working in deuterostome evolution since his graduate working with Greg Wray on echinoderms. He started working on hemichordates with Mike Levine at UC Berkeley and then continued at Berkeley with John Gerhart and Marc Kirschner. He starting his lab at University of Chicago in 2005 and moved to Stanford in 2010.
Postdocs
Laurent Formery
Laurent is a joint postdoc with Dan Rokhsar’s lab (UC Berkeley). Laurent is working on his favorite group of animals, the bizarre echinoderms, and tries to understand how their unique pentaradial body plan is related to the ancestral bilateral body plan of other deuterostomes. To do so, he is using several echinoderm species for comparative approaches combining molecular biology and bioinformatics. Before joining the Lowe lab, Laurent obtained a PhD from Sorbonne University (France), during which he worked on the development and evolution of the nervous system in the sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus, and on the roles of intercellular signaling pathways in this process. As part of his PhD, Laurent spent one year at the Shimoda Marine Research Center (Japan). Laurent is broadly fascinated by developmental biology, by the evolution of body plans, nervous systems and life history stages, and by zoological studies of weird animals in general.
PhD. Students
Lauren Lubeck
Lauren is broadly interested in developmental patterning in marine organisms on a molecular level. She graduated from Brown University in 2019 with a Bachelor's degree in Biology, on the Cell and Molecular Biology track. Most of Lauren's research experience has been with echinoderms and she is excited to branch out into other marine invertebrates in the lab.
Albert Martí i Sabarí
Albert joined the Lowe Lab as a PhD student in September 2022. He graduated from University College London (United Kingdom) with an MSci in Biological Sciences, specializing in Cell Biology. His research experience is mainly focused on the cellular structures and dynamics of nervous systems, and he previously studied the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying nervous system regeneration in the brittle star Amphiura filiformis. Albert is most passionate about the diversity and evolution of developmental processes and animal body plans, particularly those of peculiar marine invertebrates and their nervous systems.
Staff
Riley
Riley has been relieving lab stress for cookies since 2011
Jenny Grossman
Jenny is a recent graduate from California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) where she received a Bachelor’s in Marine Science. While at CSUMB, she discovered her passion for research and science education. She has spent the past four years doing research in fields such as environmental physiology and behavioral ecology. One of Jenny’s career goals is to help improve the youth’s literacy in ocean and earth related topics. She is also an enthusiastic naturalist who enjoys tide-pooling, hiking, and scientific illustration.
Pamela Hung
Pam has been the Lowe lab administrator since January 2023.
In her 23 years at Stanford as a research administrative associate at Biology department, she has broad knowledge in multidisciplinary research administration by working for faculty and labs in areas of Genetics, Neurosciences, Cell Molecular Biology, Conservation Ecology and Evolution. Pam has received Humanities & Sciences Dean’s Award of Merit in April 2012 and H&S Dean’s Award of Merit, Spirit in May 2023.
Peter Nilsson
Peter Nilsson joined the lab in 2022 as a tech following his Masters with Bruno Pernet at CSU Long Beach. He is taking care of our animals and larvae and will be developing new larval rearing facilities.
Heidi Tate
Heidi joined the Lowe Lab in October 2023 with an interest in the development and evolution of diverse marine invertebrates, especially the echinoderms. She graduated with a master’s degree from Scripps Oceanography at UC San Diego where she investigated the development and patterning of skeletogenic cells during the late larval stages of sea urchins, and worked on applying transgenic techniques to these animals to aid in answering broader questions. Heidi is excited to explore other aspects of development, particularly on the evolution and function of echinoderm nervous systems.
Lab Alumni
José Andrade Lopez
José investigated the structure of the enteropneust nervous system by defining the diversity of neural cell types, their distribution and connectivity in the developing juveniles of Saccoglossus. He is currently a postdoc at Genentech.
Paul was a grad student in the lab who investigated how genomic information drives cellular composition in metazoan animals. His work focused on how the cellular composition of larvae changes during the process of metamorphosis in the indirect-developing enteropneust hemichordate Schizocardium californicum. He graduated in June 2022 and joined Mansi Srivastava's lab at Harvard as a postdoc.
Nat was a PhD. student in the lab from 2012 - 2018. His thesis focussed on the evolution of multicellularity and used the anemone Nematostella vectensis to investigate the evolution of cell adhesion using both a developmental and biochemical approach.
Jens was a postdoc in the lab from 2009 - 2016 working on posterior growth and the evolution of body plans. He is currently a Research Assistant Professor in Elena Casey's lab at Georgetown University.
Andrew was in the lab from 2007-2009 as a PhD. student and is now an Assistant Professor at University of Cambridge in the Department of Zoology.
Paul was a PhD. student in the lab from 2012-2017- he developed Schizocardium as a new model for the lab, and is now a postdoc in the Baxevannis Lab at NIH.
Stephen was a PhD. student in the lab from 2007-2012. He worked on mesoderm specification and development in Saccolgossus and is currently a Postdoc in Marianne Bronners lab at Caltech.
Chris Lang
Chris worked in the lab as a summer intern for a few years and is now in a PhD program at UC Santa Cruz in Environmental Studies.
Judith Levine
Judith did a Masters degree in echinoderm body patterning and graduated in 2014
Joseph Lim
Andrew Miller
Andrew worked for several summers as an intern working on echinoderm development and website construction. He is now an environmental attorney at Shute Mihaly and Weinberger in San Francisco.
Paul Minor
Paul worked on the evolution of gene regulation as a postdoc and is now a staff scientist at BioRad.
Veronica Pagowski
Veronica is a PhD. student in the lab and is interested in nervous system diversity and evolution in marine invertebrates. She works on understanding how the larval nervous system controls ecologically relevant behavior in the bat star Patiria miniata. More broadly, she aims to understand how larval nervous systems control important “decisions” for a larva to successfully disperse, find food, and settle in optimal locations. Veronica is generally interested in understanding how comparatively simple nervous systems direct complex behavior in marine invertebrates and how these unique nervous systems can provide new insights into neurobiology research.
Ari was a PhD. student in the lab from 2008-2013. He worked on the evolution of deuterostome brains in the lab and following a postdoc with Bob Goldstein at UNC Chapel Hill, he is starting his own lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Virginia Charlottesville.
John Rogers
John worked in the lab as a undergraduate developing transgenic approaches in the starfish Patiria miniata. He is now a medical student at USC.
Cat Rogers
Cat was a Stanford BSURP REU student who worked with Paul Bump. Cat gracefully transitioned to a fully remote project during the COVID-19 pandemic and worked on a project entitled, “Keep Your Head Up: Cell Type Comparisons of Anteriorly Patterned Larva to Adult in Schizocardium californicum”. Cat will be starting as postbac with Katherine Rogers at NIH.
Auston Rutledge
Auston was a Lab Tech from 2017-2021 where he improved algae culturing and the husbandry of Nematostella, Schizocardium, Patiria and Parastichopus. He is currently a Ph.D. Student in the Reitzel Lab at the University of North Carolina Charlotte.
Clover Stubbert
Clover was a UROC student from Cal State Monterey Bay (CSUMB) who worked with Paul Bump on looking at the expression of candidate stem cell markers in Schizocardium californicum. After completing her capstone project with Paul, she continued her interest in stem cells and went on to a postbac in Erin Davies’s Lab at NIH.
Miranda Vogt
Miranda worked as an underdgraduate with Nat Clarke on development of the sea anenome Nematostella vectensis.
Marcin was a graduate student in the lab from 2007 to 2012. His work focussed on the role of Nodal signaling in the early development of S. kowalevskii. He is now the manager of the National Xenopus Resource at the MBL.