William Allen, Ph.D.

Principal Investigator

Will is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

He received his Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics-Biology from Brown University, M.Phil. in Computational Biology from the University of Cambridge, and Ph.D. in Neurosciences from Stanford, where he was co-advised by Karl Deisseroth and Liqun Luo. As a graduate student, he developed tools to map the structure and function of the mammalian brain at a large scale and high resolution, and applied these tools to uncover the neural mechanisms of thirst.

Prior to starting his lab at Stanford, he was an independent Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. As a Junior Fellow, he collaborated with the groups of Xiaowei Zhuang, Jonathan Weissman, Catherine Dulac, and Feng Zhang at Harvard and MIT to map the molecular and spatial architecture of mouse brain aging, and to develop new tools for large-scale in vivo pooled genetic screens with multimodal sequencing- and imaging-based readouts, which were applied as a proof-of-principle to uncover novel regulators of liver physiology.

He is the recipient of multiple fellowships and awards, including the Churchill Scholarship, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, Hertz Foundation Fellowship, Nemko Prize in Cellular or Molecular Neuroscience, Weintraub Graduate Student Award, Science & SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists, the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, and the Arc Ignite Award.