Marlis successfully defended her PhD thesis

Adam Martin has been promoted to Associate Professor, effective July 1, 2016.

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.

Biology graduate student, Natalie Heer, joins the lab. Natalie received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University where she worked in the Reck-Peterson lab on dynein motility.

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

Congratulations Mary Ann Collins on publishing review article on plant and animal morphogenesis in Developmental Cell!

Congratulations Jaci on a stellar PhD thesis and tour de force paper. We wish her the best of luck on her next position in industry!