Stephany Foster, PhD

Stephany received her bachelor of arts in biology from Brown University. After her undergraduate degree, she was an associate scientific writer at Recombine (acquired by CooperGenomics ) where she covered a wide array of topics including strengths of fertility treatment options, and how genetic carrier screening can be used to make informed decisions during family planning.

Stephany received her PhD in molecular biology, cell biology, and biochemistry from Brown University. As a doctoral student in the lab of Dr. Gary Wessel, she leveraged experimental and computational methodologies to investigate how signaling plays a role in germ cell development. She also published the first single cell RNA sequencing dataset for an echinoderm species, creating an extensive resource of early cell types resulting in three collaborative projects and two publications. While pursuing her PhD, she worked at Brown Technology Innovations as a science communicator, where she created communications materials to market commercialization opportunities around Brown research, maintained technical marketing materials in intellectual property databases, and updated the Tech Innovations news website.

• “A single cell RNA seq analysis of Brachyury expressing cell clusters demonstrates a morphogenesis associated signal
  center of oral ectoderm in sea urchin embryos,” co author, Development Biology, March 2022
• “Distinct mechanisms of germ cell factor regulation for an inductive germ cell fate,” first author, bioRxiv, February 2022
• “A single cell RNA seq resource for early sea urchin development,” first author, Development, December 2020
• “Regulation of dynamic pigment cell states at single-cell resolution,” co-author, eLife, August 2020
• Single cell RNA-seq in the sea urchin embryo show marked celltype specificity in the Delta/Notch pathway,” first author, Molecular Reproduction and Development, June 2019
• “Identifying gene expression from single cells to single genes,” co-author, Methods in Cell Biology, January 2019