Congratulations Dr. Vasquez

Yujie joins us from the University of Chicago where she completed her Ph.D. with David Kovar. For her graduate work, Yujie worked on developing in vitro assays for imaging molecular interactions with actin filaments.

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

Postdoc Mary Ann Collins publishes paper from her PhD work in Molecular Biology of the Cell. One of her microscopy images was selected for the cover!

Congratulations to graduate student, Juana De La O, on passing her qualifying exam.

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.

We have a number of new additions to the lab including postdocs Jasmin Imran Alsous and Nat Clarke, graduate students Anna Yeh and Jaclyn Camuglia, undergraduates Prateek Kalakuntla and Jennifer Nwako, and technician Vardges Tserunyan.