How do cells acquire a unique fate, a specific function or a particular molecular identity? How is cellular identity regulating cell behavior and how does it inform the formation, maintenance and function of tissues, organs and organisms? These questions are at the intersection of cell, developmental and mechanobiology and are the focus of my research program.
For two decades, I created new courses, developed new teaching strategies, and mentored
junior faculty and postdocs while teaching a wide range of Biology courses. Then in 2020 the
pandemic and stark racial injustices forced us to make drastic changes in how we teach, and to
rethink how we address students’ experiences of our coursework. I will describe how the
pandemic has been an opportunity for me to improve student experience and growth in my
courses: getting rid of high stakes exams where I can, creating student-centered policies and
Our ability to study brain and behavior has long proceeded in lock-step with advances in technology. At the same time, understanding of neurobiological principles has continuously driven technological innovations, including serving as the inspiration for most of the major advances in artificial intelligence. Even so, engineered systems still struggle to achieve flexible behaviors that require interaction with the physics of the world. All animals excel at such sensorimotor behaviors within their natural contexts.
Crickets use sound to find mates. The louder their sound is the further it reaches. The textbooks say that they increase their acoustic space using just morphology and mechanics. Song producing wings and females ears resonate at the same frequency enhancing the size of their acoustic space. But some crickets didn’t read the textbook. In this talk, I will present some research on the Oecanthines, beautiful insects called tree crickets. Males tree crickets use a behavioural strategy to make themselves louder. They manufacture a baffle, a tool that makes them louder.
Single cell approaches are causing biologists to re-evaluate classical ideas of cell types and how they arise during embryonic development. One population of particular interest is the neural crest, because it migrates throughout the body to give rise to a huge variety of derivatives such as peripheral neurons, pigment cells and bones of the skull. How do such migratory cells navigate through ever-changing environments yet reliably acquire these diverse fates? Our single cell transcriptomic studies in zebrafish suggest that they do so through a series of lineage bifurcations.
