Lisa Julian

Dr. Lisa Julian is an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University in the Department of Biological Sciences. She is a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Developmental Origins of Stem Cell Fate, and a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research / Parkinson Society BC Scholar.

After BSc and MSc degrees in the Department of Biochemistry at Western University, Julian completed her PhD with Dr. Ruth Slack at the University of Ottawa (2013), where she studied non-canonical roles of cell cycle regulatory proteins in directing neural stem cell fate. Subsequently, she joined Dr. William Stanford’s lab as a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ottawa Hospital Institute, where she engineered humanized models of multi-system genetic diseases.

Julian’s research aims to understand how decisions made during stem cell identity determination impact the long-term function and disease susceptibility of downstream cell types. Her lab develops 2D and 3D human pluripotent stem cell models of neurodevelopmental diseases that lead to intellectual disability, epilepsy, and cancer. Her group focuses on understanding and identifying therapeutic strategies for rare genetic disorders.

For an up-to-date list of publications by Dr. Julian, please see Google Scholar.