About Chelsea Pagan
Job title: Senior Scientific Project and Alliance Manager
Degrees: PhD ’18
Career stage: Mid-career
State of practice: Seattle, WA
Current practice settings: Research – industry, Public health / nonprofit
Lived career experiences/transitions:
- Changing specialty
- Non-clinical careers
Graduation year from the UW School of Medicine: 2018
Specialty/subspecialty: Pathology/Neuroscience
Research or other professional interests: Neuroscience, Autoimmune diseases
Chelsea’s Bio:
Chelsea joined the Allen Institute in 2021 as Scientific Project and Alliance Manager in Brain Science. She manages a portfolio of genomics-based projects including single cell and spatial transcriptomics of mouse brain tissue. She serves as a liaison between scientific project leads and internal departmental stakeholders, such as legal, compliance, finance, etc., as well as between the Institute and external collaborative research partners. Chelsea holds a Ph.D. in Pathology/Molecular Basis of Disease from University of Washington, a B.S. in Biological Sciences from University of California – Irvine, a certificate in Molecular Medicine from Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Project Management Professional (PMP) credential from Project Management Institute. Prior to accepting her current role, Chelsea led the development of a genomic database to study sudden infant death (SIDS) at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, a collaborative effort between the institute, a large private technology company, and several non-profit organizations. She has also managed laboratory operations at the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation Spinal Cord Injury Core, coordinating the design and execution of experiments in a variety of animal models of neurological trauma. Her dissertation work interrogated the effects of chronic intermittent hypoxia, a model of sleep apnea, on hippocampal adult neurogenesis in the laboratory of Jan-Marino “Nino” Ramirez.
Research Focus:
I’m interested in the development and management of programs that increase knowledge, improve health, and reduce disease. At the Allen Institute, I seek to understand the myriad cells that make up our brains by studying through their gene expression, and how that expression may change over time in both physiological and pathological conditions. I am passionate about increasing the speed of scientific advancement through consensus development, open sharing of expertise, work standardization, and effective communication across all fields and stakeholders.