Welcome Mingmar Sherpa!

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.

Congratulations to Jeanne Jodoin, who was awarded a prestigious NIH F32 postdoctoral fellowship.

Congratulations to Soline on publishing her work “Myosin 2-Induced Mitotic Rounding Enables Columnar Epithelial Cells to Interpret Cortical Spindle Positioning Cues” in Current Biology. Soline showed how mitotic cell rounding is critical to orient cell division such that both daughter cells remain in the tissue.

Congratulations Mimi Xie for publishing her work “Loss of Gα12/13 Exacerbates Apical Area-dependence of Actomyosin Contractility” in Molecular Biology of the Cell! Mimi showed how apical actin density can depend on apex size. Suppressing this dependence is important to coordinate contractility across a tissue.

Claudia Vasquez successfully defended her thesis. She gave a stellar seminar to faculty, friends, and colleagues at MIT. Nice job!

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