Hello!!! I am Sophie Jean Walton, and my pronouns are she/her/hers. I will be starting as a postdoc in the New York University Department of Biology on Sept 28, where I will be working with Joy Bergelson. I just finished my PhD in the Stanford Biophysics program with Benjamin Good and Dmitri Petrov. I study evolutionary ecology in diverse microbial communities. I studied mammalian gut microbiota in my PhD, and I am transitioning to plant microbiota as a postdoc. I have also devoted much of my PhD to mentorship, teaching, and service.
I did my undergraduate training at Caltech, where I received my B.S. in Bioengineering with a minor in Information and Data Science in 2020. As an undergraduate, I worked on a variety of projects in biology and bioengineering. I studied the genetics of sleep and heat shock response in Caenorhabditis elegans with Paul Sternberg and Han Wang. I worked on machine learning methods for protein engineering with Possu Huang, and I studied dosage control in cell populations with Richard Murray.
I spend most of my free time running, climbing, hiking, backpacking, and looking at wildlife. I grew up in the Bay Area, and I attended Sequoia High School in Redwood City. I now live in Brooklyn.
Contact
My email is sw7604 at nyu dot edu. I am activate on BlueSky.
Updated September 2025, Adapted from alyulina.github.io