William Lowry

William Lowry, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He currently serves as Director of Cancer Education, Training and Mentoring at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and Associate Director of Education and Technology Transfer at the UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center. 

Lowry earned his BS degree from the University of Washington in Molecular and Cell Biology in 1996, and his PhD from Cornell Medical College in Neuroscience in 2002. Lowry was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University (2002–2006). He joined the UCLA faculty as an assistant professor in 2006, and rose to the rank of professor in 2015.

In his research lab, Lowry uses stem cells to study how the embryonic ectoderm splits into two distinct lineages of cell types: the neural cells that comprise the nervous system and the epidermal cells that make up the outer surface of the body including skin, hair and nails. He seeks to understand how this process can go awry, leading to intellectual disability syndromes such as autism in the case of neural cells, or a predisposition to cancers like carcinoma in the case of skin cells.

He has received numerous honors for his work as a scientist and researcher, including the Allen Distinguished Investigator Award (2015–2018) and the Maria Rowena Ross Term Chair (2009–2014). In 2009, he was the recipient of the March of Dimes’ Basil O’Connor Starter Scholar Award, and in 2003, the Ruth L. NIH Kirchstein National Research Service Award.