Hannah Yevick Wins Nano-K 2015 Thesis Prize

Congratulations Claudia on publishing her work “Drosophila Non-muscle Myosin II Motor Activity Determines the Rate of Tissue Folding” in eLife. Claudia demonstrated that myosin 2 motor activity sets the rate of apical constriction and tissue folding, showing that myosin 2 is the motor that drives these processes. This work was the result of a great collaboration with James Sellers’ lab at the National Institutes of Health.

Juana De La O comes to us from the University of Chicago and the MIT Biology PhD program.

Postdoctoral fellow, Hannah Yevick, published her research titled Structural redundancy in supracellular actomyosin networks enables robust tissue folding in Developmental Cell. You can hear her talk about what she discovered in the video produced by Raleigh McElvery of the MIT Biology department. Read an MIT News article on the research.

Congratulations Jonathan on publishing his work “Apical Sarcomere-like Actomyosin Contracts Nonmuscle Drosophila Epithelial Cells” in Developmental Cell. Jonathan discovered that the apical actin cortex of an epithelial cell can be organized like a muscle sarcomere to promote contraction and tissue folding.

Congratulations to graduate student, Claudia Vasquez, on passing her qualifying exam.

Congratulations Dr. Yeh on defending your PhD and getting a job in industry! We wish her the best of luck.