Lucy Shapiro is a Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine where she holds the Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Chair in Cancer Research and is the Director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and is a member of the Board of Directors of Pacific Biosciences, Inc. She founded the anti-infectives discovery company, Anacor Pharmaceuticals, and is a member of the Anacor Board of Directors.  Professor Shapiro has been the recipient of multiple honors, including: election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Philosophical Society. She was awarded the FASEB Excellence in Science Award, the 2005 Selman Waksman Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Canadian International 2009 Gairdner Award, the 2009 John Scott Award, the 2010 Abbott Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2012 Horwitz Prize and President Obama awarded her the National Medal of Science in 2012. Her studies of the control of the bacterial cell cycle and the establishment of cell fate has yielded valuable paradigms for understanding the bacterial cell as an integrated system in which the transcriptional circuitry is interwoven with the three-dimensional deployment of key regulatory and morphological proteins, adding a spatial dimension to the systems biology of regulatory networks.