Welcome Elena Kingston

Congratulations to graduate student, Mimi Xie, for her publication “Intracellular signalling and intercellular coupling coordinate heterogeneous contractile events to facilitate tissue folding” in Nature Communications. In the paper, Mimi showed that cells exhibit three classes of contractile events, unconstricting, unratcheted, and ratcheted. Mimi demonstrated that cells undergo transitions between different classes of contractions, going from unconstricting or unratcheted contractions to ratcheted contractions. A transcription factor that regulates this developmental stage is important for the proper order of contractile events. It is important for cells to generate ratcheted contractions because this promotes cooperation between cells.

Jeanne comes to us from Vanderbilt University where she received a Ph.D. for her work on the mechanisms of dynein motor localization.

Congratulations to graduate student, Natalie Heer, on giving an excellent research presentation and successfully defending her thesis. Best of luck at your new position as a Data Scientist.

Congratulations to graduate student, Jonathan Coravos, on passing his qualifying exam.

Congratulations Soline on the publication of a book chapter Mechanical Force Sensing in Tissues!

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.