Dr. Lauren Wagner is a postdoctoral fellow in the Hernandez Laboratory at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, where she studies the interplay between genetic variation and brain development during infancy in order to understand early development and the emergence of psychiatric conditions like autism. As a graduate student in the UCLA neuroscience program, Lauren was awarded a T32 fellowship in Brain and Behavioral Development in Adolescence, an NICHD F31 Predoctoral Fellowship to study the neurodevelopmental bases of language development and autism-associated language impairments in infants using MRI, as well as a William Orr Dingwall Dissertation Fellowship on the Neural Foundations of Language. Supporting her current postdoctoral work, Lauren is currently receiving training in genetics and genomics for integrative neuroimaging-genetics methods through an NIH T15 Postdoctoral Fellowship in Precision Medicine. With support from the Friends of Semel Fellowship, Lauren will expand her research to examine the neural and genetic bases of excitation-inhibition balance in the infant brain and its effects on emerging psychiatric symptoms. By leveraging large biobank data and cutting-edge MRI analysis methods, this project will advance our understanding of the genetic underpinnings of excitatory-inhibitory disruption as well as its consequences for later behavioral and psychiatric development