Landen received a BS in bioengineering with a minor in bioinformatics from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2020. Landen spent most of his undergraduate career working in Russell Corbett-Detig’s lab at the UCSC Genomics Institute, where he developed and employed comparative genomics methods to interrogate the fundamental drivers of intron gain across diverse eukaryotes. He also spent time at the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research developing software for comparative single-cell transcriptomics. Landen is generally interested in the application of comparative and population genetics to understand the forces that govern eukaryotic genome structure evolution.