Kate Lawrenson, PhD

Kate Lawrenson, PhD

Dr. Lawrenson received both her bachelors degree with first-class honours and Ph.D. from University College London before relocating to Los Angeles to perform postdoctoral research at the University of Southern California. Dr. Lawrenson is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Women’s Cancer Program at the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The Lawrenson lab has recently developed a novel tool – the Cancer Core Transcription factor Specificity (CaCTS) algorithm – to identify putative lineage-specific transcription factors in ovarian cancer. We are now characterizing how these factors drive the deregulation of ovarian cancer transcriptomes, with a particular focus on cancer-associated inherited and acquired genetic variants in the noncoding genome. Dr. Lawrenson’s research has been supported by an Ann and Sol Schreiber Mentored Investigator Award from the OCRA, a Cancer Free Generation Research Grant from the Tower Foundation, and a K99/R00 award from the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Lawrenson is part of the Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium (OCAC) and is an academic editor at PeerJ.