Lauren A. O'Connell

Lauren O'Connell is an American neurobiologist and associate professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, specializing in the intersections of behavioral neuroscience, ecology, and evolution. Her research considers how animals handle challenges in their environment. She received a L'Oréal-USA For Women in Science fellowship in 2015.

Early life and education O'Connell is from rural Texas. She grew up on a goat farm in a family of six. After high school, she attended Tarrant County College, where she earned an Associate of Arts in Natural Sciences in 2004 and she spent two years before joining Cornell University. Her doctoral research explored neural and molecular mechanisms underlying social behavior in vertebrates.

In 2014, she won a L'Oréal USA For Women in Science Fellowship and she also won a Changing Face of STEM Mentorship award in 2016.

Career After completing her Ph.D., O'Connell was appointed a Bauer Fellow at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, where she established her independent research laboratory at the age of 27.

She had become interested in the evolution of parental care in an animal clade that had a lot of variation in reproductive strategies. O'Connell noted that maternal behavior has only evolved once in mammals, and wanted to identify whether there were different ways to build a maternal brain. She identified that mother frogs transfer their poisons to their offspring in an effort to provide some chemical defences to their young tadpoles.

Her lab has demonstrated that poison frogs acquire their toxins from their diet, particularly from ants and mites. This dietary dependency highlights the impact of habitat destruction, as declining habitat quality reduces the availability of these toxin-rich prey, diminishing the frogs' chemical defenses and increasing their vulnerability to predators. Additionally, early findings in her lab suggested that ion channel mutations could be key to poison resistance in frogs.

In her work on parental behaviors, O’Connell's research has revealed that the neural circuits promoting parenting in poison frogs are similar in both males and females. Notably, galanin neurons are particularly active in parenting behaviors in frogs, findings consistent with similar studies in mammals such as mice. Her lab has also uncovered species-specific differences in the regulation of parenting behaviors, with South American and Malagasy poison frogs displaying distinct neural adaptations.

Awards and honors 2020 Mcknight Scholar Award 2019 New Innovator Award, National Institutes of Health 2019 Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences 2016 Changing Face of STEM Mentorship award 2018 Hellman Faculty Fellow 2014 L'Oréal-USA For Women in Science Fellowship 2011 Young Investigator Award, Society for Social Neuroscience

Selected publications