{"id":137493,"date":"2025-07-29T18:43:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T22:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/?post_type=bu-article&p=137493"},"modified":"2025-08-26T14:59:27","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T18:59:27","slug":"lauren-ayers","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/news-events\/articles\/2025\/lauren-ayers\/","title":{"rendered":"Lauren Ayers"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tStudent Researchers<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLauren Ayers\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t\n
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July 29, 2025<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\tTwitter<\/span><\/span>\n\t\t\tFacebook<\/span><\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\t\n\n\n

Lauren Ayers is drawn to the challenge of unanswered questions. A third-year PhD student working in Darrell Kotton\u2019s lab<\/a> at the Center for Regenerative Medicine<\/a> (CReM), Ayers is tackling one of the toughest problems in medicine, how to improve chronically low survival rates in respiratory diseases like pulmonary fibrosis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all our engineering knowledge, we really struggle to do it better than the human body can do it.<\/p>Lauren Ayers<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Ayers spends most of her days in the CReM tissue room, working with pluripotent stem cells exploring how the regenerative repair process goes awry in the epithelial cells that form the single-cell-deep lining of the lungs and the air sacs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere can be this dysfunctional regenerative response that can drive fibrosis, and it appears in a lot of different diseases that have severe alveolar damage,\u201d Ayers said. \u201cWe don’t know too much mechanistically about how that happens, and that’s just very interesting to me; not knowing much about that transition means that we don’t have very good therapeutics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if she didn\u2019t come around to bench science until relatively late in life, Ayers\u2019 back story is one of determination, a strong work ethic and boundless curiosity. At MIT, Ayers won awards for academics, research and athletics while majoring in nuclear science & engineering and co-captaining the rowing team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ayers shelved a career as a nuclear engineer to continue rowing, finishing sixth in the world championships in 2015 as a member of the U.S. women\u2019s lightweight quadruple skulls, followed by coaching at Harvard and Dartmouth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI loved that whole lifestyle, but it is inherently pretty selfish. Nobody benefits from me rowing four hours a day, except me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A 2019 cycling accident that left her father a quadriplegic pointed her back towards science, research and the quest to find answers where there are none.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBasically, the doctors said, \u2018There’s nothing we can do to fix it,\u2019\u201d Ayers recalled of her father\u2019s injury. \u201cI think that’s really what kicked off my interest in regenerative medicine and biomedical research, and why I landed in the CReM.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor all our engineering knowledge, we really struggle to do it better than the human body can do it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lauren Ayers is drawn to the challenge of unanswered questions. A third-year PhD student working in Darrell Kotton\u2019s lab at the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM), Ayers is tackling one of the toughest problems in medicine, how to improve chronically low survival rates in respiratory diseases like pulmonary fibrosis. For all our engineering knowledge, we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":903,"featured_media":137401,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bu_prepress_billboard":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term_manual":"Student Researchers"},"tags":[405,457],"bu-publication":[367],"medicine-article-category":[],"medicine-topic":[],"news-article-category":[478],"news-topic":[],"bu_edition":[390],"media_type":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/137493"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/bu-article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137493"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/137493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137554,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/137493\/revisions\/137554"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137493"},{"taxonomy":"bu-publication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-publication?post=137493"},{"taxonomy":"medicine-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/medicine-article-category?post=137493"},{"taxonomy":"medicine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/medicine-topic?post=137493"},{"taxonomy":"news-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-article-category?post=137493"},{"taxonomy":"news-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-topic?post=137493"},{"taxonomy":"bu_edition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu_edition?post=137493"},{"taxonomy":"media_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media_type?post=137493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}