Deirdre (Dede) became interested in questions about the origins and evolution of animal body plans as an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College working with Stan Rachootin and Rachel Fink, and as a research assistant at UCLA under David Jacobs and Ruth Gates. She got her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology at U.C. Berkeley studying the control of asymmetric cell division in the leech Helobdella with David Weisblat. For her post-doc she joined David McClay’s lab at Duke University to study Gene Regulatory Networks in sea urchin embryogenesis. She took the MBL Embryology course in 2009 and began a long term collaboration studying the embryology of the slipper snail Crepidula with Jonathan Henry. Dede established her own research group in the Marine Biology Research Division of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the Fall of 2016 and there she and her group study a range of echinoderm and spiralian animals using comparative gene regulatory network analysis, live cell imaging, and functional studies. Visit the Lyons Lab website at: www.lyonslab.org