Lauren Owens is a senior Plant Sciences major in CALS. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, she attended the University of Missouri-St. Louis before transferring to Cornell in her sophomore year of college. In Rho Psi Eta, she has previously served as President, Treasurer, Webmaster, and Co-Community Service and Fundraising chair. Outside of Rho Psi Eta, she is Vice President of Pi Alpha Xi, Cornell’s plant science honors society, a research mentor for the Cornell Undergraduate Research Board’s Peer Mentorship Program, and a member of Phi Sigma Pi, a national honors society. Outside of clubs, she is a research assistant in Dr. Li Li’s lab where she will complete her honors thesis on the regulation of chromoplast biogenesis and carotenoid accumulation in Arabidopsis. Previously, she has also worked on the SOIL3 project team for the Cornell Cooperative Extension compiling infographics to improve the accessibility of New York stakeholders to agronomic information. After graduating from Cornell in May 2022, she will attend the University of California, Berkeley, for a Ph.D. in Plant Biology. Her research interests are broadly in plant biochemistry and synthetic biology. In the future, she aims to stay in academia and start her own lab. In her free time, she enjoys attending random concerts, rock climbing, painting, and irresponsibly buying more plants.