Lillian Kay Petersen

Lillian Kay Petersen aims to reveal the mechanisms of gene regulation by combining high-throughput microfluidic assays and synthetic biology.

Petersen is currently a first-year doctoral student in genetics at Stanford University. In 2024, she graduated from Harvard University, where she studied applied mathematics and molecular biology.

Petersen has written three first-author papers to date, ranging from revealing the genetic underpinnings of disease to predicting crop yields from satellite imagery. Most recently, she developed machine learning algorithms to predict how much a given protein sequence will activate or repress gene expression and, through this model, discovered new biology of transcriptional regulation. For this work she received the Thomas Hoopes Prize for an outstanding undergraduate thesis. She is a Cameron Impact Scholar and a Regeneron Science Talent Search first-place winner and has presented her research at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the American Society for Human Genetics annual meeting, among others.

Petersen was born in Denver, Colorado, and grew up running, hiking and skiing in the beautiful mountains of northern New Mexico.