Mechanical Regulation of Cell Polarity During Endoderm Morphogenes (Position Filled)

This research position in the Morphogenesis and Developmental Biomechanics Lab focuses on understanding how physical forces generated during embryonic development can influence cell behaviors underlying morphogenesis of the gut tube. The gut tube is an embryonic structure that gives rise to the entire respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts, and its initial formation is poorly understood from either molecular or biophysical standpoints. The project will combine biomechanics, molecular biology, and live in vivo imaging in the chick embryo, a classical model of embryology, in order to understand how a segment of the gut tube, known as the midgut, is scultped from an initially flat sheet of epithelial cells on the surface of the embryo.