Jonathan Coravos Passed Qualifying Exam

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

Elena, our new Technical Assistant, graduated from Swarthmore College in May 2014. Elena spent a summer doing research in David Stern’s lab at Janelia Farm.

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, 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.

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!

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