Associate Professor of Biology
Courses Taught
- BI410: Developmental Biology
Current Research
Our research is focused on understanding secondary (dorsal-ventral) axis specification and skeletal patterning in the sea urchin. We are interested in producing a systems-level description for these processes. Sea urchin, a non-chordate deuterostome, is an ideal model organism for systems-level developmental studies. Genomic analysis has revealed that sea urchins share the diversity of signaling and transcriptional molecules with vertebrates, including humans, but lack the complexity associated with a duplicated genome. Further, sea urchin larvae are morphologically quite simple, being composed of approximately 15 cell types, and thus are accessible to detailed analysis of cell specification and cell-cell communication mechanisms. Finally, the use of gene regulatory networks to model developmental processes was pioneered in urchin, providing a strong precedent for this work. The lab is focused primarily on two projects: understanding how the dorsal-ventral axis is specified, and how the larval skeleton is patterned. We are pursuing these projects through a combination of molecular biology, biochemistry, cell biology, computational modeling, and systems biology approaches.