Affiliation: Baylor College of Medicine

Dr. Margot Williams received her BS from Muskingum College in 2007. She earned her PhD in Cell Biology from the University of Virginia where, in the lab of Dr. Ann Sutherland, she developed ex utero live imaging approaches to directly visualize morphogenetic cell behaviors during mouse gastrulation and neurulation. In 2013, Dr. Williams joined the lab of Dr. Lilianna Solnica-Krezel at Washington University School of Medicine as a postdoctoral research fellow. While there, she developed innovative optical, chromatin profiling, and explantation techniques in zebrafish to identify spatial and signaling cues regulating cell polarity and cell movements underlying gastrulation morphogenesis. Dr. Williams joined the faculty of Baylor College of Medicine in 2019, where she and her lab seek to understand how embryonic cell behaviors are spatiotemporally coordinated to shape the emerging body plan.