Hannah Yevick awarded NIH F32 fellowship

Congratulations Fernando on a productive summer and successfully presenting your poster at the end of summer program. We look forward to seeing what you do in the future!

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

Congratulations to postdoc, Hannah Yevick, for publishing her review article “Quantitative Analysis of Cell Shape and the Cytoskeleton in Developmental Biology” in WIREs Developmental Biology.

Congratulations to graduate student, Natalie Heer, for publishing her review article “Tension, Contraction and Tissue Morphogenesis” in Development. Natalie contributed to the special issue celebrating the 100th anniversary of “On Growth and Form.” Her review article describes the latest research explaining how forces are generated to sculpt tissues.

The Martin lab won the coveted group costume competition for the Biology department Halloween party. They had a winning combination of fish-like pillows and various forms of wasabi.

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.