Lauren Sallan
Lauren Sallan is an evolutionary biologist and paleontologist whose research focuses on how biodiversity is structured across deep time. Her work treats macroevolution as a complex system shaped by ecological limits, extinction, and functional constraint, using the fossil record and living fishes to uncover general principles governing evolutionary pattern and persistence.
She earned her PhD in Integrative Biology from the University of Chicago in 2012. She then held a prestigious independent postdoctoral fellowship with the Michigan Society of Fellows, which included a faculty appointment in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She subsequently served as the Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology to found the Macroevolution Unit in 2022.
Dr. Sallan received the Stensio Award for early-career paleoichthyology in 2015 and the University of Chicago Biological Science Division Distinguished Service Award for Early Achievement in 2018. In 2019, she received a CAREER Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation and became a Senior Fellow of TED. She is a two-time speaker at TED, and her talks on fish evolution, mass extinction, and paleontology have been viewed by millions worldwide.
Research Unit