Laurie Stevison, PhD

Associate Professor

(334) 844-1636
lss0021@auburn.edu
Rouse 317
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https://webhome.auburn.edu/~lss0021/

Dr. Laurie Stevison start at Auburn University in 2015 and earned tenure in 2022, where she is now an Associate Professor. Dr. Stevison grew up in Louisiana where she attended at a small liberal arts college in Shreveport, LA. Her undergraduate degree was in Biophysics. Between semesters in college, she experienced several summer undergraduate research programs where she was exposed to evolutionary genetics. Following this, she completed a Master's in EEB at Rice University and then continued to her PhD at Duke University. There she used fruit flies as a model to understand how variation in meiotic recombination rate shaped genomes. Following her PhD, she continued to train in computational genomics at UCSF working with collaborators across the globe as a members of the Great Ape Genome Project. Since starting at Auburn, she has built a strong research lab and has published several research articles. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, reading books and spending time with her two little boys.

Education

PhD Duke University 2011
MA Rice University 2007
BS Centenary College of Louisiana 2005

Professional Experience

Dr. Stevison is an active reviewer of papers for prestigious journals and has served on several NSF and NIH grant panels. At Auburn, she is the leader of the Evolutionary Genetics and Systematics Research Core. She is also the Graduate Program Officer for the Certificate Program in Computational Biology. She has a deep commitment to course-based research with published curriculum articles as well as peer-reviewed articles with numerous student co-authors. She has been recognized by prestigious awards, including the John Maynard Smith Prize awarded through the European Society for Evolutionary Biology in 2014. She has received two mentoring awards, including a recent college-level undergraduate mentoring award based on the success of having mentored over 80 undergraduates in the 10 years at Auburn.

Innovation

Dr. Stevison's research program seeks to identify the genomic changes and evolutionary processes that shape the formation of new species using population and comparative genomics approaches. Specifically, she has published works investigating the role of natural selection, hybridization and meiotic recombination rate in shaping genetic variation in both fruit flies and non-human primates. More recently, her lab group is focused on the role of the environment to shape variation in meiotic recombination rate. She has a commitment to open science framework with pre-registered research studies, published protocols and an active GitHub repository with companion code repositories for her published works. Recently, she has been featured in media outlets such as NPR, Newsweek and Country Living Magazine based on her expertise on getting rid of fruit flies in the home.

Teaching

Since starting at Auburn, Dr. Stevison has developed two courses – 1) computational biology and 2) bioinformatics. Between these courses and introductory genetics, she has taught over 1900 students in nearly eleven years as faculty. She has also participated in various course redesign workshops to build and improve these active learning courses, one of which is taught in a flipped format. Dr. Stevison helps students develop as scientists through hands-on learning experiences and fostering an inclusive STEM classroom experience. As a faculty member at a land-grant institution, she has a deep commitment to democratizing access to authentic research experiences—a commitment that aligns with the foundational mission of expanding educational opportunities to all students. Both as a participant in the Genomics Education Partnership and via the development of bioinformatics curriculum in R, she has integrated research into the classroom as a means of fostering scientific identity formation in students. Her overall teaching commitment is demonstrated through multiple collaborative publications with former students that, while outside of her primary research focus, have generated passion for science and scholarly contributions for students over the years.