Our Lab

Laura Seeholzer, Ph.D

Assistant Professor

Laura Seeholzer joined Stanford University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurobiology where her lab studies brain-body communication at the molecular, cellular and systems level.

She completed her PhD training with Dr. Vanessa Ruta at Rockefeller University where she studied how neural circuits change to underlie behavioral evolution across different species of fruit flies. Wanting to ask questions at a more molecular level, she then joined David Julius’s lab at UCSF. While David is best known for the discovery of how we sense cold, spicey and irritating stimuli, her post-doctoral research focused on understanding the function of a rare population of epithelial cells called neuroendocrine cells (see past research for more details).

She continues to study these cells and other sensory cells in the airway with the goal of a gaining a comprehensive molecular and cellular map of airway sensation. She loves electrophysiology, imaging and behavior. She dreams of studying the evolution of brain-body communication in weird non-model organism. Or identifying novel ways to treat chronic cough. But really, she just wants to have a lab full of happy, successful people.

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Laura was supported by a Helen Hay Whitney and IRACDA Scholars Fellowships during her post-doc. She is a member of the Leading Edge Fellowship community as well as the 2024 winner of the Eppendorf & Science Prize in Neurobiology. As a graduate student, she was supported by an NSF GRFP and Kavli Graduate Student Fellowship.