Our theoretical and computational work is designed to integrate and abstract rapidly accumulating heterogeneous datasets, to propose critical tests of multiscale regulatory mechanisms, and to guide our own genetic and imaging experiments. Our research is organized around three main themes: the mechanistic modeling of pattern formation and morphogenesis; the synthesis and decomposition of developmental trajectories; and the modeling of human developmental defects. Current projects focus on small cell clusters (motivated by our work on early embryos and animal germline development), graph dynamics in rearranging cell networks (motivated by problems of epithelial morphogenesis), and the effects of activating mutations in signaling enzymes (motivated by our work on a large class of human developmental abnormalities).
Gastrulation movements in all animal embryos start with regulated deformations of patterned epithelial sheets, which are driven by cell divisions,…
Current BiologyIn most animals, the oocyte is the largest cell by volume. The oocyte undergoes a period of large-scale growth during…
Trends in Cell BiologyProblems with networks of coupled oscillators arise in multiple contexts, commonly leading to the question about the dependence of network…
Biophysical Journal
