Lauren Sallan

Why you should listen

Lauren Sallan uses the vast record of living and fossil marine ecosystems as a global, "deep time" database. She combines cutting-edge analytics with experimental results and natural observations to reveal why some species persist and diversify while others die off, and how life responds to environmental challenges big and small. She has used this multidisciplinary approach to discover the largest, "sixth" mass extinction of vertebrates, reveal the environmental origins of our earliest ancestors and show how new fish predators can shift prey ecology at global scales.

Sallan is the founder and head of the Marine Macroevolution Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), Japan, where she leads an international team of multidisciplinary scientists. She was previously the Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and became a TED Fellow in 2017 and a TED Senior Fellow in 2019. Her research has been published in outlets such as Science, Nature, PNAS and Current Biology, as well featured by The New York Times, the BBC, Forbes, the New Scientist, the Discovery Channel and others.