Dr. Lawson is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine Medical School, in the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center (CFCCC) and Department of Physiology and Biophysics. She is affiliated with the Center for Complex Biological Systems (CCBS), the Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center and the Immunology Institute. She is co-leader of the UCI Breast Disease Oriented Team (DOT), which is a network of clinicians and basic scientists who collaborate on translational breast cancer research, clinical trials and community outreach. She did her graduate training under the mentorship of Dr. Owen Witte at UCLA, where she was the first in the field to define mouse prostate stem cells and interrogate their role in prostate cancer initiation (Lawson DA et al., PNAS, 2007; Lawson DA et al., JCI, 2007; Lawson DA et al., PNAS 2010). This protocol is heavily cited and remains a mainstay in the field for stem cell isolation (Lukacs R et al., Nat. Protoc., 2010). As a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Zena Werb’s lab at UCSF, she built a new method to study metastatic progression combining human patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models of breast cancer and emerging single-cell transcriptome technologies. This work showed for the first time that metastatic cells express a distinct gene expression profile akin to normal breast epithelial stem cells during seeding in distal tissues (Lawson DA et al., Nature, 2015). Her laboratory continues to be at the forefront of this field, and recently published a high-impact review on tumor heterogeneity and metastasis (Lawson DA et al., Nat. Cell Biol, 2018), and a research article using single-cell RNA sequencing to identify a metabolic shift important for cancer cell metastasis (Davis RT et al., Nat. Cell Biol, 2020). Her laboratory has also made critical contributions to the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) project, an international consortium to sequence every cell in the human body, where she is part of a multi-PI effort to generate a comprehensive, multidimensional single-cell atlas of the human breast (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, CZI) (Nguyen Q et al., Nat. Commun., 2017).
