Julia Zeitlinger, Ph.D., is a developmental and computational biologist where she serves as an Investigator at the Stowers Institute.

The Zeitlinger Lab focuses on gene regulation using the fruit fly, Drosophila, with the goal of uncovering principles that can be applied to human development and disease. Her team also studies both the coding and non-coding portions of DNA that impact gene expression and regulation.

Growing up in Germany, Zeitlinger loved math, science and the arts. The time she spent in school theater productions inspired dreams of becoming an actress. But ultimately, she fell in love with developmental biology during her anatomy classes in Germany and her first stint at laboratory research at King’s College London. Zeitlinger went on to earn a Ph.D. in developmental genetics from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, intrigued by the up-and-coming field of genomics and an opportunity to reconnect with her love for math.

In 2007, she joined the Stowers Institute, where she found a perfect alignment with the Institute’s scientific research focus on genomics, transcription, and developmental biology. Since then she has combined her analytical skills and creativity to develop the latest genomics technologies and to understand the complexities of gene regulation during development.