The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Jennifer A. Zallen, Ph.D., professor, developmental biology program, member, Sloan Kettering Institute, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Speaker bio(s)

A major challenge in developmental biology is to understand how large-scale tissue structure arises from events that occur on a cellular and molecular level. The Zallen laboratory uses multidisciplinary approaches from cell and developmental biology, physics, engineering, and computer science to study how tissue architecture is dynamically established and remodeled throughout development. A major morphogenetic event in the development of the embryo is elongation of the head-to-tail body axis, a process that requires rapid and coordinated movements of hundreds of cells. Dr. Zallen’s laboratory identified the force-generating machinery that drives polarized cell movements during axis elongation in Drosophila, and discovered that these movements are systematically oriented by a global positional code that involves an ancient family of receptors that are widely used for pathogen recognition by the innate immune system. Dr. Zallen’s laboratory also discovered the rosette mechanism for tissue elongation, a spatially regulated collective cell behavior in which groups of cells assemble into multicellular rosette structures that form and resolve in a directional fashion. Since this discovery, rosettes have been shown to be a conserved mechanism of epithelial elongation in flies, chicks, frogs, and mice. These findings elucidate general principles that link molecular signals to the physical forces and collective cell behaviors that produce tissue structure.

 

Dr. Zallen is a member of the Sloan Kettering Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. She received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco, with Dr. Cori Bargmann. She did her postdoctoral research with Dr. Eric Wieschaus at Princeton University and joined the faculty at Sloan Kettering Institute in 2005. Dr. Zallen was awarded a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, a March of Dimes Basil O’Connor Starter Scholar Research Award, and a Searle Scholars Award. She was a W.M. Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholar in Medical Research from 2007 to 2012 and an HHMI Early Career Scientist from 2009 to 2015.

Open to

Public

Host

Hermann Steller, Ph.D.

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Justin Sloboda

Phone

(212) 327-7785

Sponsor

Justin Sloboda
(212) 327-7785
jsloboda@rockefeller.edu

Readings

http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=4201