Marlis successfully defended her PhD thesis
Congratulations to Marlis Denk-Lobnig on a wonderful thesis talk! Marlis is moving on to do a postdoc at the University of Michigan.
Congratulations to Marlis Denk-Lobnig on a wonderful thesis talk! Marlis is moving on to do a postdoc at the University of Michigan.
Biology student Marlis Denk-Lobnig joins the lab. Marlis did her undergraduate work at Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany. Marlis is interested in applying computational approaches to studying signaling networks in an embryo.
Congratulations Jeanne Jodoin for publishing her work “Abl Suppresses Cell Extrusion and Intercalation During Epithelium Folding” in Molecular Biology of the Cell! Jeanne showed how the Abelson tyrosine kinase suppresses an EMT-like cell extrusion during tissue folding.
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 Jaci Camuglia and Anna Yeh on passing their Ph.D. candidacy exams! Excited to see what research directions we go in over the next few years.
Jennifer Chu reports on Anthony McDougal’s doctoral thesis, studying butterfly wing scale morphogenesis in Vanessa cardui.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/new-findings-first-moments-butterfly-scale-formation-0626
Original publication here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8670486/
Congratulations Hannah Yevick, for winning the Nano-K 2015 Thesis Prize for interdisciplinary research. This is a national award in France for excellent PhD theses that cross disciplines.