Lauren Woodard, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
In 2015 she began her Career Development Award from the VA and in 2018 she was appointed to tenure-track Assistant Professor at VUMC. Dr. Woodard is the Principal Investigator for the Woodard Lab and actively guides each of her lab members as they explore transposons, CRISPR, stem cells, and 3D culture models with the end goal of rapidly developing new models and treatments for patients with kidney disease.
Born in Houston, Dr. Woodard completed her B.S. in Biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin as a Beckman Scholar in the laboratory of Dr. Karen Browning on translation initiation. She completed an undergraduate research experience at U.T. M.D. Anderson Science Park in the laboratory of Dr. Mark Bedford on protein arginine methyltransferase substrates.
After graduating with highest honors in 2004, Dr. Woodard completed her Ph.D. in 2009 in the interdisciplinary Cancer Biology program at Stanford University in the Genetics Department laboratory of Dr. Michele Calos where she studied the safety of phiC31 integrase for gene therapy. She moved back to Texas to begin her postdoctoral fellowship in the Baylor College of Medicine Division of Nephrology with Dr. Matthew Wilson, where she studied transposon function in mammalian cells and pioneered a novel technique to transfect adult mouse kidney.