Congratulations Dr. Vasquez

Hannah received her Ph.D. from the Institut Curie in Paris, France. Her Bachelor’s degree is in Physics and she published a really cool paper on cells walking a “tightrope.” She is interested in collective cell behavior changing tissue shape.

Congratulations postdoc Jasmin Imran Alsous and grad student Jonathan Jackson on publishing their paper titlec Dynamics of hydraulic and contractile wave-mediated fluid transport during Drosophila oogenesis in PNAS.

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

Jonathan Coravos gave an amazing seminar and successfully defended his thesis. Well done Jonathan! Have fun in Chile!

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.

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