Investigator Bio

Alison Paquette, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and a member of the Seattle Children's Research Institute's Center for Developmental Biology and Regenerative Medicine. She uses computational biology approaches to study how the prenatal environment influences infant and child health outcomes. Dr. Paquette received her PhD from Dartmouth’s Program in Experimental and Molecular Medicine. Under the mentorship of Dr. Carmen Marsit and through her PhD program, she gained formal training in molecular and computational genomics, toxicology and epidemiology. She used multi-modal approaches to investigate placental epigenetics and newborn neurobehavior, and this work revealed novel roles for serotonin and glucocorticoid signaling in the placenta. She performed the first epigenome-wide assessment of associations between global placental DNA methylation and newborn neurobehavioral assessments. Her work highlighted the influence of epigenetic programming on placental function and fetal brain development. After her PhD, Dr. Paquette completed a postdoctoral fellowship and was a research scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology, where she learned systems biology and network analysis techniques and adapted these approaches to study pregnancy complications. In 2018, she received a K99 Transition to Independence Fellowship and was co-mentored by Dr. Nathan Price (Institute for Systems Biology), Louis Muglia (Burroughs Wellcome Fund) and Sheela Sathyanarayana (Seattle Children’s Research Institute). Dr. Paquette joined the CDBRM in August 2020.