Dr. Nathan Lord joined the Department of Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine as an assistant professor in 2020. He completed his PhD in the laboratory of Dr. Johan Paulsson at the Harvard Department of Systems Biology, where he was an NSF graduate research fellow. There, he initiated a long-term collaboration with Dr. Richard Losick’s lab which led to the discovery of new principles for noise management in biological circuits. For his postdoc, Dr. Lord joined the lab of Dr. Alexander Schier in the Harvard Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology to study the mechanistic basis of robust embryonic development as an Arnold O. Beckman Foundation postdoctoral fellow.
The Lord Lab aims to understand embryos encode instructions for their cells in spatially-resolved patterns of signaling and gene expression. To this end, the Lord Lab is building new methods that enable on-demand generation of signaling patterns in stem cells, organoids and embryos. Easily programmable genetic perturbations— made possible by TALENs and CRISPR nucleases— revolutionized developmental biology. By bringing similar innovations to signaling patterns, the Lord lab hopes to reveal the pathways and principles underlying robust development. Over the long run, the Dr. Lord aims to harness these principles to guide the design of robust, error-correcting synthetic developmental systems and tissues. The Lord Lab is supported by an NIH Pathway to Independence K99-R00 award, a New Initiative Grant from the Charles E. Kaufmann Foundation, and an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.