Margot Lautens
They/Them
I am queer and I am a data scientist.//
I’ve always been drawn to potential and diversity of stories. When I was younger this expressed itself through my love of history but in high school, a teacher showed me how biology had stories too. In my final year of undergrad, I realized that so did data. These stories buffered me against how different I sometimes felt. As I grew older, I realized that some of those differences were about how I interpreted the world from my own gender and sexuality to the way my brain worked.
I graduated with a BSc in Molecular Genetics and History from the University of Toronto but ultimately chose to pursue genetics at the graduate level, also at UofT. I am now a senior graduate student investigating oxygen-independent metabolism in C.elegans to find new drug targets against parasitic worms with a combination of high-throughput imaging assays, metabolomics and structural evolutionary work.
I married my wife in June 2019. I love how biology and evolution show us that diversity is one of our nature’s most important principles just as my queerness is composed of convergent as well as diverse experiences and feelings about my gender and my sexuality.