Introducing Dr. Sarah Price
MAY 13, 2023
The Lawrenz Lab celebrates newly minted plague doctor Sarah Price!
So proud of Sarah for being awarded the University of Louisville’s Guy Stevenson Award for Excellence in Graduate Studies. The Stevenson Award recognizes an outstanding doctoral degree recipient who has demonstrated excellence in both scholarship and leadership in their discipline and has made significant contributions to teaching and service.
Sarah was recognized for this prestigious and highly competitive award during the 2023 graduate hooding ceremony with the following:
During her childhood in rural Tennessee, Sarah Price’s initial love for science was driven by calculating race car velocities at the NASCAR track and completing simple experiments in her garden with plants. For her undergraduate studies, Sarah attended the University of Tennessee, where she received her bachelor’s degree in Microbiology and her first research experience. After graduation, Sarah worked as a research technician at John’s Hopkins School of Medicine before beginning her graduate school training at the University of Louisville in 2016. Shortly after, Sarah joined Matt Lawrenz’s lab in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology.
Early in her graduate career, Sarah was awarded an NIH T32 training award to support her research. In 2019, Sarah successfully competed for her own funding through an NIH F31 fellowship, the second such fellowship received by a UofL student. This fellowship funded her research to study a conceptionally novel mechanism for Yersinia pestis, the bacteria responsible for the disease known as plague, to acquire zinc. Sarah’s research has led to significant discoveries that have impacted the field of microbial pathogenesis and furthered our knowledge of how microbes compete for nutrients within the host. Sarah has contributed to six publications, with three first author publications, and she has been invited to present at six regional and international conferences.
During her time as a graduate student, Sarah has excelled not only as a researcher, but also as a mentor and leader in the science community. In 2018, Sarah took over the leadership of Louisville Science Pathways (LSP), a science outreach program that provides summer research opportunities to Jefferson County high school students. Sarah worked directly with JCPS to learn how LSP could support JCPS students, and she initiated a partnership with a local foundation, SummerWorks, to integrate LSP into their active portfolio of programs that provide Louisville area youth new career opportunities. Through these partnerships, Sarah crafted a program to align with the needs of JCPS students. More recently, Sarah developed a seminar series for high school students to learn about applying to college, applying to medical school, and scientific careers. Overall, Sarah’s work with LSP has generated a self-supported summer research opportunity for JCPS students, which will foster the next generation of scientists here at UofL and beyond.
Sarah’s experiences have led her to aspire to lead her own research program at an academic institution; she will continue her training as a postdoctoral researcher at Vanderbilt University and will continue to use her education and experiences to promote equity in STEM to ensure opportunities for science education are accessible to all students.
On her last day at UofL before starting a postdoc in Eric Skaar’s lab at Vanderbilt, Sarah left an amazing gift — a bourbon barrel head engraved with a super cool new lab logo.
Congratulations Dr. Price, and best wishes for continued success in the Skaar lab!