Welcome Jeanne Jodoin

Congratulations Jeanne Jodin, for publishing her work “Stable Force Balance between Epithelial Cells Arises from F-Actin Turnover” in Developmental Cell. Jeanne showed that stable force balance between cells in a tissue requires robust actin filament turnover. The paper was also highlighted by the journal. Read the paper and the highlight article.

Congratulations to graduate student, Clint Ko, on publishing his research titled Microtubules promote intercellular contractile force transmission during tissue folding in the Journal of Cell Biology. Clint discovered that microtubules maintain intercellular adhesion by regulating actin.

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.

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

Congratulations Claudia on publishing her work “Drosophila Non-muscle Myosin II Motor Activity Determines the Rate of Tissue Folding” in eLife. Claudia demonstrated that myosin 2 motor activity sets the rate of apical constriction and tissue folding, showing that myosin 2 is the motor that drives these processes. This work was the result of a great collaboration with James Sellers’ lab at the National Institutes of Health.

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.