Congratulations Dr. Coravos

Congratulations to Marlis Denk-Lobnig on a wonderful thesis talk! Marlis is moving on to do a postdoc at the University of Michigan.

Congratulations Dr. Jackson on defending your PhD and getting a postdoc position in Germany.  Best of luck.

Congratulations to postdoc, Frank Mason, for the recent publication of his paper, “Apical domain polarization promotes actin-myosin assembly to drive ratchet-like apical constriction” on Nature Cell Biology. In the paper, Mason et al. show that the signals that regulate contractile forces in constricting cells exhibit a spatial organization within the apical domain of the cell. Signals that activate myosin motors are polarized to the center of the apical domain. Actin polymerization in this domain suppresses junctional protein localization, restricting junctional proteins to cell-cell interfaces. Thus, a “radial” cell polarity is established, which is shown to be important for apical constriction.

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

Mimi Xie successfully defended her thesis. She gave an excellent seminar to our community. Nice job Mimi!

Congratulations Natalie on publishing her work “Actomyosin-based Tissue Folding Requires a Multicellular Myosin Gradient” in Development. Natalie discovered that a tissue-wide gradient in transcription and resulting contractility is necessary to fold a tissue. We had fun collaborating with Pearson Miller and the Dunkel Lab on this project.