Research+Profiles

toc //**Members:** Please place your sketch in alphabetical order by last name//
(Use the **//Heading 3//**, not **boldface**, setting for the line with your name on it.)

is a graduate student in the Shvartsman Lab at Princeton University, who studies RTK signaling and DV patterning in Drosophila embryos.
 * Bomyi Lim**

Munjal Akankshi
is a graduate student in Lecuit Lab at IBDM, Marseille, carrying out research on myosin regulation during tissue morphogenesis in //Drosophila//.

Karen Alim
is a theoretical physicist in the group of Michael P. Brenner at Harvard University. She is interested in how shape and form is controlled during the development of plants and the morphological dynamics of networks formed by fungi and slime molds. Homepage

Martin Behrndt
is a PhD student in the [|lab of][|Carl-Phillipp Heisenberg] at the IST Austria near Vienna. He's generally interested in understanding force generating principles of morphogenesis and currently focuses on the process of epithelial spreading during zebrafish epiboly.

James Briscoe
is a developmental biologist from the MRC-National Institute for Medical Research, London interested in the vertebrate central nervous system. Lab Website

Danfeng (Dani) Cai
is a PhD student in the lab of [|Denise Montell] at UCSB. She's interested in studying force generation during tissue morphogenesis and collective cell migration. She's also very interested in using live imaging to look at all kinds of interesting processes happening in development.

Michelle Dickinson
is a lecturer from Auckland University, New Zealand who develops mechanical probe testing techniques for small structures including cells and tissues in aqueous environments for quantitative measurements of living specimens.

Seth Donoughe
is a graduate student in the [|Extavour Lab] at Harvard University who has done [|research] on planar cell polarity and germ cell specification in insects.

Pau Formosa-Jordan
has just finished a PhD in Physics at the University of Barcelona in Spain, under the supervision of Dr. Marta Ibañes and Prof. José María Sancho. He has worked on theoretical aspects of pattern formation in animal and plant tissues. He would like to start a postdoc combining theory and experiments for studying morphogenesis, or focusing on quantitative aspects of cell signaling. []

Stephanie Gline
is a post doc in Lionel Christiaen's lab working on the roles of external guidance cues in directing collective migration of the heart precursors in Ciona.

Edouard Hannezo
is a graduate student at the Curie Institute in Paris, who is studying theoretically collective cell migration, stem cell renewal dynamics, and epithelial sheet morphologies in 3D.

Greg Huber
is a biophysicist, Deputy Director of the KITP, and a member of the Department of Physics at UCSB. He likes cheese.

Wolfgang Keil
is a physicist and theoretical neuroscientist, now working on C. elegans vulval development as a postdoctoral fellow in the groups of Eric D. Siggia and Shai Shaham at the Rockefeller University in New York City.

**Romain Levayer**
is a postdoc working on cell competition in Drosophila wing disc and pupal notum in Eduardo Moreno's group (University of Bern, Switzerland) focusing on the interplay between cell topology, clone shape and the induction of apoptosis.

**Pierre-François Lenne**
is group leader at the Developmental Biology Institute in Marseille (IBDM, CNRS and Aix-Marseille Université, France). His group aims at understanding the physical principles, which underlie the cell dynamics and cell mechanics during tissue morphogenesis. In particular his group investigates how cell behaviours such as cell shape changes and cell polarity emerge from the mesoscopic (between the microscopic and macroscopic scales) properties of cell surfaces and interfaces in vivo.

Nicolas Loyer
is a graduate student in Le Borgne Lab at IGDR, Rennes, studying AP-1-dependent E-Cadherin trafficking in //Drosophila//.

Qiyan Mao
is a graduate student in Robert Ho lab at the University of Chicago. Currently, she uses live analyses in the zebrafish embryo to understand the interplay between cell migration and pattern formation. In the long term, she wishes to investigate the genetic and physical principles underlying the systems properties of the embryo.

Tal Markus
Is a postdoc in Laboratoire de Physique Statistique at the École normale supérieure Paris. Working on super resolution imaging of dynamical processes.

Jakob Metzger
is a postdoc at the MPI for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen [|working on] stochastic processes in particle and wave systems as well as population genetics.

Denise Montell
is the Duggan Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at UCSB. She develops the Drosophila ovary as a model for studying many biological problems including stem cell biology, pattern formation, morphogen gradient interpretation, and tissue morphogenesis. The lab combines genetic approaches with live imaging. A major focus has been on the collective migration of the border cells. The lab is currently interested in understanding how signaling pathways and mechanical forces feedback on one another to control cell movements and tissue morphogensis. The lab has also discovered a novel cell survival mechainsm called anastasis, by which cells can recover from the brink of death thereby limiting permanent tissue damage due to transient insults. http://www.mcdb.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/denise-montell

Caren Norden
is a group leader at the MPI-CBG in Dresden. She tries to understand how morphogenetic events shape the retina from epithelial formation to neuronal network. Special interest lies in the cell biology and emergent properties of these processes. http://www.mpi-cbg.de/de/research/research-groups/caren-norden.html

Ewa Paluch
is a group leader at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, at University College London, UK. She is interested in the biology and physics of cellular morphogenesis. Her [|laboratory] combines cell biology, biophysics and quantitative imaging, and works in close collaboration with theoretical physicists, to investigate the regulation of the cellular actin cortex, and the function of cortical mechanics in cell shape control, particularly during cell migration and cell division.

Timothy Saunders
is a postdoc in the group of Lars Hufnagel at EMBL-Heidelberg. He will soon be starting his own group at the Mechanobiology Institute, National University of Singapore. His research focuses on using lightsheet microscopy to probe pattern formation and tissue morphogenesis in the early //Drosophila// embryo.

Jakub Sedzinski
is a postdoc at the University of Texas, Austin. He is interested in understanding the function of the acto-myosin cortex in cilia cell formation.

Nathanie Trisnadi
is a graduate student in the Stathopoulos lab at the California Institute of Technology. She is studying early embryonic development in //Drosophila//, including gene patterning and collective cell migration.

Yan Yan
is an assistant professor in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her lab studies epithelial morphogenesis and growth control in //Drosophila//.