Lauren O’Connell is an associate professor at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, during which time she studied the brain mechanism supporting social networks. She then established her own laboratory at Harvard University, where she worked to build poison frogs as a model system for studying the neural basis of family relationships. In 2017, she moved to Stanford to continue her research on understanding organismal responses to social and environmental stimuli using amphibians. She has received numerous honors, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.