Quantitative Analysis of Development

Biophysics of epithelial organ development and morphogenesis

There is a great need to study developmental biology from an engineering perspective to develop new strategies for building tissues and treating degenerative tissue diseases. Probing animal development with quantitative tools can potentially improve traditional methods of tissue engineering as well as inspire completely novel methods for creating synthetic organs. Toward this end, the research program in the lab focuses on integrating chemical and mechanical signaling at the tissue scale through advancing the state of the art for in vitro tissue culture and utilizing computational modeling of tissue patterning and morphogenesis.

 

The fruit fly, Drosophila, has served as an important model system for identifying tumor suppressor genes, which are conserved in humans as well, and due to the genetic tools available is the main model system investigated by the lab.