Carly G. K. Ziegler (Second First Name Gail) was born in Palo Alto, California, and grew up in Decatur, Georgia. Here, she gained a profound appreciation for southern food, hiking the Appalachian trail, and played supporting roles in Atlanta-based MTV reality shows. She majored in Mathematics and Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, and worked with Dr. John Wherry and Dr. David Artis using network modeling to explore the T cell response to infection. Next, she moved to New York City and worked with Dr. Gregoire Altan-Bonnet at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, studying BCR structure and signaling dynamics in B cell neoplasms.

She joined the Harvard/MIT MSTP program in 2014, completed the first 1/2 of medical school within the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology MD program. She is completing her PhD within the Harvard Biophysics program, and joined the Shalek lab in 2014. Her primary research interests lie in the interaction between host and pathogen, and how single cell RNA-Sequencing can uncover emergent mechanisms of infection and immunity. She is also interested in the development of new technology and new computational tools to weave in metadata (e.g. space, time, interactions) into single cell RNA-Seq datasets.

Carly spends her free time touring Seattle breweries, hiking with her puppies, making feminist cross-stitchings, rock climbing, and being outdoors whenever possible.