Distinguished BME Seminar Series: Dr. Stephanie Fraley

Title: "Environmental Control of Cell Motility: Mechanisms, Models, and Therapeutic Targets"

Abstract: Understanding how cells migrate in coordinated and reliable ways is fundamental to tissue development, healing, immune responses, and diseases like metastatic cancer. While decades of work have elucidated many components of the motility machinery, how these parts integrate to produce distinct migration behaviors remains unclear. This challenge is underscored by observations that the same cell type can exhibit vastly different migration patterns depending on its environment, such as in 2D versus 3D matrices. Are these differences driven by entirely distinct regulatory mechanisms, or by shifts in the activity or thresholds of shared processes? Moreover, how do cells sense environmental cues and convert them into sustained motility responses? In this talk, I will present our multi-scale systems approach to map how extracellular cues regulate intracellular signaling, cytoskeletal dynamics, and transcriptional programs to produce coordinated cell movements in 3D tissue-like environments. I will also highlight how these insights inform the design of organoid models and therapeutic strategies targeting migratory behaviors in triple-negative breast cancer and pancreatic cancer.