Development, host of the Node, invites you to submit your latest research to our upcoming Special Issue – The Extracellular Environment in Development, Regeneration and Stem Cells. This issue will be coordinated by Guest Editors Alex Hughes (University of Pennsylvania) and Rashmi Priya (The Francis Crick Institute), working alongside our team of research-active Editors.
Developmental biology is often viewed as the behaviour of cells, including, for example, how the regulation of genomic information and signal transduction influences cell morphology, differentiation and migration, which are fundamental to developmental processes such as morphogenesis and patterning. However, the environment beyond the cell is far from static and inert. Cells and tissues do not develop in isolation, and the local physical environment, including its geometry, material properties and fluid forces, provides mechanical cues and influences signal propagation, both within and between tissues and organs. Animal cells also regulate their environment through the secretion of extracellular molecules, which are dynamically remodelled during development, homeostasis, wounding and regeneration, and are likely to have contributed to the evolution of multicellularity. In plants, cell wall composition contributes to the growth and function of different tissues. Furthermore, extracellular factors are essential for the construction of biominerals and structural materials across kingdoms, including lignin, chitin, bone and keratin. The importance of extracellular cues is becoming increasingly evident with the generation of complex stem cell-based models of development that require specific extracellular culture conditions. In this special issue, we seek to highlight papers that look beyond the cell and focus on the influence of the physical environment in instructing developmental processes both in vivo and in vitro.
The deadline for submitting research papers is 1 March 2026.
The Beddington medal is awarded by the British Society for Developmental Biology (BSDB) for the best PhD thesis in developmental biology, defended in the year previous to the award. The 2025 winner was Rory Maizels, who completed his PhD with James Briscoe at the Francis Crick Institute in London, UK. In this interview, we hear about Rory’s career path, his PhD work and what he is excited about in developmental biology.
Where were you born and where did you grow up?
I was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland.
When did you first get interested in science?
My parents tell me, perhaps jokingly, that one of my first complete sentences, spoken as I dropped a rubber duck into the bath, was “why is gravity?” I guess this suggests a degree of scientific curiosity from a young age. A career in research was always in my sights: the main reason I chose to study biology over physics is that I believed, aged 16, that the biological research landscape had more opportunities for progress.
How did you come to do a PhD with James Briscoe at the Francis Crick Institute?
As an undergraduate at Oxford, I was interested in studying the ways that cells can perform communication and computation. The most fascinating example for me was the Trpoperon, a gene regulation system in bacteria that controls the expression of tryptophan synthesis genes. This system is a crazily elegant example of how molecular systems can perform precise computation, which I found to be a pretty eye-opening idea.
Unfortunately, in animal systems things tend to be a bit more complicated than in E. coli. Instead of neat little operons, we have vast networks of interacting parts, where one signal seems to interact with almost all cellular processes, depending on context.I wanted to understand human biology in the way we understand the Trp operon; that eye-opening kind of understanding, that ‘oh wow, of course’intuition; but it seemed in many cases, we hadn’t got there yet. This realisation seemed, to me, pretty good motivation to go and do some research myself.
So, these tryptophanic interests led me to James’ lab in two ways: first, James’ work on patterning in the spinal cord captured exactly my interest in understanding the logic and computation of molecular systems. Second, on a more pragmatic level, after my undergraduate I went to study computational science & engineering at Harvard, funded by a Frank Knox Fellowship. I focused on mathematical modelling and data science methods and at the same time, the Briscoe lab were publishing a number of theoretical papers modelling the function of gene regulatory networks, along with more data-driven papers performing single-cell analysis. So, it seemed a perfect fit.
Can you talk more about your PhD project?
The aim for my project was to build methods for mechanistic analysis of cell fate decisions from single-cell data. To go beyond descriptive time-courses and population-level descriptions, to construct models that can simulate the gene expression dynamics of cellular transitions and, in doing so, connect early variations in expression to downstream differences in cell fate.
Key to this, in my mind, was the concept of dynamics: if we want to understand mechanism — the temporal ordering of events and the causal interactions between components — we need a clear picture of the dynamics that these mechanisms create. The value of single-cell resolution is that you can capture a picture of the spectrum of states that are possible as cells transition between types. This allows a range of different ‘pseudo-temporal’ approaches that can create expression time-series between your system’s beginning and end. But to study the mechanism driving these transitions, this sort of population-level time series analysis is insufficient: to actually model and simulate cell fate decisions, we needed to capture dynamics at single-cell level as well.
To tackle this, I established and optimised a time-resolved transcriptomics method that integrated two methods: metabolic labelling, which uses a uridine analogue 4sU to label nascent transcripts such that one can distinguish new from old reads in the sequencing data; and single-cell combinatorial indexing, a method for single-cell RNA sequencing that is compatible with fixed cells (necessary for the temporal labelling) and requires no bespoke microfluidic devices.
I applied this approach to in vitro differentiation of mouse stem cells into neural and mesodermal cells. The noisy, high-dimensional nature of the resultant sequencing data would usually be prohibitive for dynamical systems modelling (trying to learn a vector field in thousands of dimensions is no simple task…). So, to handle this I built a machine learning framework that models the dynamics of cell fate decisions with an abstract, low-dimensional vector field embedded in a ‘latent’ representation of the data. A biophysical model of transcription and labelling is embedded in the model, connecting this abstract vector field to the observed labelling data. The result was a model that could simulate the differentiation trajectory of each progenitor cell in the dataset, producing a distribution of trajectories that linked early variations to later fate decisions. Through these simulations, I identified that modulators of Shh signalling show early differences between fates, suggesting a previously unappreciated level of feedback between signal interpretation and cell fate decisions.
How did the project get started?
In the early weeks, I was deliberating over whether I should focus on a more theoretical project that applied dynamical systems theory to the study of gene regulatory networks, or a more data-driven approach that worked with single-cell data. I presented this conundrum to James, who just looked at me and asked, “why not both?”
Were there any frustrating moments?
The original aim of the project was to take existing protocols and computational methods and apply them to our system and our questions. The final product of the project was a study of why existing protocols and computational methods did not work, and the development of improved methods that did. This should be indication enough that there were frustrating moments aplenty!
If you took one abiding memory with you from your PhD, what would it be?
One moment that stands out is analysing the data from our first successful pilot of the homemade single-cell protocol. It was a simple pilot with unremarkable samples, but seeing that the experiment worked, seeing the expected cell types appear and genes being expressed in the right place came with a huge sense of excitement, almost a feeling of disbelief that this crazy, painful protocol was actually working.
Did you work on other projects during your PhD?
I sporadically got distracted and detoured, but the real exploration came at the end of the thesis, with exciting off-shoot projects that are still on-going!
What have you been working on since you completed your PhD? What’s next for you?
Towards the end of the PhD and afterwards, I started some very fun projects where we increased the throughput and affordability of the sequencing pipeline by an order of magnitude or two. In this way, we were able to massively increase the sophistication of our experimental designs, allowing us to map the function of developmental gene regulatory networks from input signals to output cell fates. Now, I’ve joined EMBL EBI and the Sanger Institute as an ESPOD postdoctoral fellow, where my postdoctoral project will be a fun mix of synthetic and systems biology, engineering cells to understand their decision making!
What techniques or areas in developmental biology excite you the most?
We’re really very good at measuring things in developmental biology. We’re creating datasets with millions of observations, tens of thousands of variables across multiple ‘modalities.’ We’re getting pretty good at perturbing things too: approaches to knockout genes, introduce mutations or alter enhancers at the scale of thousands of knockouts/mutations/alterations at a time hold a lot of promise. But we’re not so good at distilling these thousand-dimensional perturbational datasets into clear understanding.
Our brains are not thousand-dimensional. Our vision is 3D; our working attention can hold onto four things at once. To understand, rather than just observe developmental biology, we need to create intuitive, mechanistic representations of these complex systems that can actually fit into our minds.
Many people are excited about the application of AI in biology. For me, the exciting prospect is that the neural networks in AI models are really useful for learning abstract functions. This means if we want to take a thousand-dimensional dataset, abstract away all the details and just learn four key parameters of our choosing, AI is a pretty good tool for that. Neural network models can learn abstract representations of datasets that can be flexibly constrained by biological information/inductive biases, depending on the specific biological question.
So, the most exciting area of developmental biology for me is the study of emergent properties; dynamic properties of a system that are only apparent when considering the system as a whole, rather than examining the system’s individual components. If we can identify the key emergent properties of a gene regulatory system, can we use AI-driven approaches to model these key properties, such that we can build a simple, intuitive understanding of developmental systems and their many thousands of observable dimensions?
Outside of the lab, what do you like to do?
My ideal day off would involve a swim in a pond in the morning, a few hours reading an overlarge book in the afternoon, and a jaunt down to the pub in the evening.
At the end of each month, I pick the same month from a random year from the past 15 years of the Node, and take a look at what people were talking about back then.
After so much travelling, my time machine is getting a bit unpredictable… in case I accidentally get stuck in the past, I’m afraid this post will be the very last time I’ll be time travelling. What a journey it’s been! If you’d like to do some time travelling yourself, you can do so using the Node’s search and filter function.
Interview with Jorge Cham, the person behind PHD Comics
Many students of the course have written about their experiences, and I’m always very jealous because the course looks so much fun! Read the posts: https://thenode.biologists.com/tag/woods-hole/
Do you have an idea for a post on the Node that you have been postponing writing for a while? Or, perhaps, you have a draft that is waiting to receive your final touches before posting? This is your opportunity to publish your piece at last for a chance to win £200. For the upcoming month and a half, we are hosting an exciting writing challenge to help battle procrastination and motivate you to share your piece with the Node’s community of developmental and stem cell biologists.
To take part in the challenge, simply post on the Node. The post can be related to current series and themes we have on the Node (or, perhaps, introducing some new exciting topic). All posts* between now and the deadline will automatically enter the pool. Register or log in to share your blog post with the community and enter.
The deadline for the challenge is 30 September, after which one winner will be randomly selected for a prize of £200 and an interview with the Node.
In this SciArt profile, we meet Kathryn Garner, whose passion for art and science has been linked throughout her life as she discovered her passion for science through her art.
Can you tell us about your background and what you work on now?
I discovered a fascination with intracellular signalling pathways early on in my BSc (Hons) Molecular Cell Biology studies at University College London (UCL), UK, which led to a PhD investigating some novel lipid transfer proteins in the heart. After UCL, I held several postdoctoral positions at the University of Bristol, first working on signalling pathways in the cardiovascular system, then, learning to use High Content Imaging (HCI) to study Gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) signalling dynamics before settling on the kidney. I was awarded a Kidney Research UK Intermediate Fellowship in 2017 to study signalling at the interface between inflammation and blood pressure regulation. HCI generates a huge amount of data, and during my research on GnRH, I worked with mathematicians and statisticians to develop mathematical models. I was able to apply some of this understanding to my fellowship research.
I began working as a Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University, UK, as the first lockdown engulfed us in 2020. I lasted a full academic year of teaching online and homeschooling before being headhunted to join Newcells Biotech as Head of Kidney Development in 2021. I led a Research & Development team developing primary kidney models for testing new drug molecules for pharmaceutical companies. I discovered that I am particularly good at establishing relationships with new clients, making connections, and helping to develop programmes of work to suit their needs. For the last year, I have been working as a consultant contributing to a wide range of projects with different types of companies, from providing advice on developing kidney models to a pharmaceutical company to helping to place cardiac organoid technology in the market for a biotech company, as well as helping a management consultancy navigate microphysiological systems (MPS), including organ-on-a-chip. I recently partnered with a software company to help my clients find custom IT solutions for connecting lab equipment, automate data analysis, or analyse tricky images – which I’m really excited about.
Orange Cell Drawing (1999). Ink and oil pastel on paper (59 x 84 cm).
Purple Cell Drawing (1999). Ink and emulsion paint on paper (59 x 84 cm).
Were you always going to be a scientist?
No, quite the opposite! The art room was where I felt I belonged at school. I was good at art and my dad is an artist. But there were a couple of things that happened early in secondary school that made me wonder whether art was everything for me. In year 10, we learnt about cell biology for the first time, and I found it came so naturally to me, like it was something I had always known. I was the only one in the class to get full marks on the cell biology test. A few months later, we were dissecting a frog, and while my lab partner had long lost interest and was off talking to a boy, I remember being captivated by the frog’s insides and wondering about the connection between what we think and the physical matter of the body. I decided then and there that I wanted to study Neuroscience and I switched my A-level choices from art to four sciences. Only, somewhere along the way, I changed my mind, and no one seemed surprised when I asked to change back to Art & Design. After finishing school, I took an Art Foundation course in High Wycombe, UK, and then moved to Cornwall, UK, to study BA(Hons) Fine Art at Falmouth College of Arts.
Ear (2004). Oil on canvas (60 x 90 cm).
Unlike at school, the curriculum at Falmouth was completely unstructured – we were given a studio space and a tutor to check in with, but other than that it was important we searched out our own inspiration to find our voice. While the other students were making etchings from drawings of shells on the beach, or painting stormy oil paintings, my curiosity took me to the biology textbooks in the library. In my first year, I made a collection of Cell Paintings inspired by brightly-coloured histology images, including Purple Cell Drawing (1999) and Orange Cell Drawing (1999). These works were fresh and vibrant but something niggled at me. It felt like I was copying – I wanted to know more. I wanted to understand the images that I was copying, and I wanted to be able to put more of myself into them. In my final year show, I displayed portraits that were complex, close-up and abstracted – teetering on the edge between what is known and what is unknown. A couple of years later, I exhibited a collection of oil paintings including Ear (2004) in a group show in a gallery in Hammersmith, UK. At this time, I was working as a Cryobank Scientist at an infertility clinic, finally studying those science A-levels in evening classes. The following year, I enrolled at UCL.
Compartmentalisation (2012). (detail) Pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper (84 x 59 cm).
And what about art – have you always enjoyed it?
All of my earliest memories included art, whether it was sitting for one of my dad’s paintings in his studio or hiding in our loft with a big piece of paper drawing an imagined village with roads and buildings. Going to galleries still fills me with that sense of wide-eyed childlike wonder that I had– what treasures would be waiting for me around the next corner? Would I find something new from an artist I’d not heard of before or an old love I’d forgotten about? On a Saturday, we might have reason to drive up to London to submit one of my dad’s paintings for an exhibition, and afterwards visit the Tate or the Royal Academy or the National Gallery.
Emergent Properties (2022-23). Oil on canvas (90 x 90 cm).
What or who are your most important artistic influences?
I love to be enveloped by art, and Terry Winters, Roberto Matta, and Sarah Sze, are artists whose work I come back to repeatedly. All three create other worlds in their art, works that you can spend ages looking at with your mind getting lost in them. Terry Winters seems to layer up graphs and other visualisations of data to create large complex paintings. In 1999, I travelled around the United States by myself on Greyhound buses, stopping in at the art galleries in the big cities. In the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I first saw ‘Invasion of the Night’ by Roberto Matta and was compelled to be absorbed by it – a safe refuge from all that was outside and unfamiliar. In the giftshop, I came across a little book of Sarah Sze’s installations, eventually able to see some in person in London several years later. Sze creates elegant miniature worlds from everyday objects – cotton buds, tape measures, pencils – and spending time with them you find yourself wishing you could shrink down to climb the tiny matchstick ladders.
Kidney slice + water treatment plant (2025). Acrylic paint on paper (42 x 59.4 cm).
How do you make your art?
As I came to the end of my PhD, I started to think about art again and how I could join everything up. I was now thinking about cells as tiny cities with highways, or as houses with compartments tailored to different functions – like in a home the bedroom is for sleeping in, the kitchen for preparing food, and so on. I made Compartmentalisation (2012) combining different types of images that had a similar level of complexity as the histology images I copied at art school, only this time with meaning. Here are compartments from a settlement of the Dogon people, who live in the central plateau region of Mali, next to plans of villages in Chad and Cameroon. At the bottom is a drawing of a circuit board, with its connected elements and flows of information. Over the years, I have tried lots of different ways of putting images together. In Emergent Properties (2022-23), I layered up the emergency evacuation plan of Cramlington Children’s Hospital in Northumberland, a children’s playground, and a circuit board, and then added the layer of green to help edit parts out to create something new. In Kidney slice + water treatment plant (2025), I returned to a histology image as a starting point and added an aerial view of a water treatment plant. The circular sediment tanks ground the abstract nature of the kidney slice and directly talk about the function of the kidney in the body.
Brain Art, illustration for the competition promotional materials (2016). Watercolour and pencil on paper (30 x 42 cm).
Does your background in science influence your art?
Art and science have tended to come together for me through public engagement activities, such as running a ‘Brain Art’ competition for local school children at Bristol Neuroscience Festival. A selection of work was presented in the Wills Memorial Building at the top of Park Street in Bristol, which is very grand, before being displayed at the Royal West of England Academy (RWA). This event was fantastic in encouraging children who are usually more interested in art to think about science for a change. It was an opportunity I think I would have loved as a child.
Sometimes, it was the process of carrying out scientific research that I found interesting from an artistic point of view, rather than the subject of the work itself. Groynes and Keys was a piece I made that directly came from my activities in the lab. I was doing a lot of cell culture at the time, and I found a good way to introduce regular drawing into my day was to draw a flask of cells under the microscope while another was being incubated with trypsin for 5 mins. This piece is an amalgamation of several drawings of HEK-293 cells and was exhibited at a SciArt exhibition at Royal United Hospital, Bath (2016-17), organised by the Bristol and Bath branch of the British Science Association. I named this piece, Groynes and Keys, because whenever I’m drawing pictures of cells, I find it difficult not to think of maps of waterways and inlets.
Groynes and Keys (2014). Watercolour and pencil on paper (30 x 42 cm).
What are you thinking of working on next?
All of my original Cell Paintings have new homes – Purple Cell Drawing can be found in a seminar room in the Learning and Research Building of Southmead Hospital, Bristol, and Compartmentalisation hangs in the foyer of the Dorothy Hodgkin Building at the University of Bristol. I am currently growing a new body of work, and I am keen to see more of it in universities, institutions and life science companies, potentially through commissions or other opportunities. I love being sent microscopy images to look at so I would be keen to work closely with scientists to make new paintings.
The 13 August 2025 webinar featured three early-career researchers working on stem cells and organoids. Here, we share the talks from Toshi Yamada (University of California San Francisco) and Daniel Medina-Cano (MSKCC).
We are delighted to bring you the return of our image competition in collaboration with the MBL Embryology course at Woods Hole. We’d like you to vote for your favourite image from the stunning submissions from the students that attended the 2025 course. The winning image will be published on the front cover of Development later this year.
Please vote for your favourite image using the poll at the bottom of the page. The voting will close on Wednesday 3 September.
Thank you and good luck to the following researchers for their contributions:
Virginia Panara, Shirley Ee Shan Liau, Sonoko Mizuno, Ignacio Casanova-Maldonado, Max Makem, Johnny Vertiz, Arthur Boutillon, Anthony Wokasch, Aria Zheyuan Huang, Amartya Tashi Mitra, Nathanial Sweet, Paul Maier, Shivangi Pandey, Marie Lebel, Chloe Kuebler, Nicole Roos
Browse through the gallery (click to view full image)
1. Longfin squid chromatophore Sonoko Mizumo, Virginia Panara, Shirley Ee Shan Liau Fluorescent imaging of the muscle ring surrounding a Longfin Squid chromatophore2. Melanocytes in a Zebrafish larva Sonoko Mizuno Bright field imaging of melanocytes in a Zebrafish larva3. Octopus embryo tentacles Ignacio Casanova-Maldonado, Max Makem & Johnny Vertiz Mitochondria (Magenta), Cell membrane (Cyan). Olympus FV4000 Confocal microscope, 10X (N.A: 0,4).4. Squid embryos Ignacio Casanova-Maldonado, Max Makem & Johnny Vertiz Nuclei (Cyan), Actin (Red). Olympus FV4000 Confocal microscope, 4X (N.A: 0.8)5. Squid head Ignacio Casanova-Maldonado, Max Makem & Johnny Vertiz Actin (magenta), circulatory system (red) mitochondria (green) and nuclei (cyan). Olympus FV4000 Confocal microscope, 10X (N.A: 0,4)6. Amphioxus larva Arthur Boutillon Amphioxus larva (stage L1) stained for nuclei (DAPI, blue) and phosphorylated myosin II (orange), imaged by point scanning confocal microscopy and prossessed using ImageJ.7. Embryonic eye of an Anole lizard Arthur Boutillon Embryonic eye of an Anole lizard stained for nuclei (DAPI, blue) and F-actin (Phalloidin, orange), imaged by spinning disc confocal microscopy and prossessed using ImageJ.8. Butterfly wing disc Arthur Boutillon Wing disc of the butterfly Vanessa cardui stained for F-actin (SiR-Actin, orange) and membrane (PKmem555, magenta), imaged by point scanning confocal microscopy and prossessed using ImageJ.9. Mouse pancreas Anthony Wokasch Ductal branching of an E15.5 mouse pancreas. E15.5 whole-mount pancreas labeled with Mucin-1. Imaged on the Olympus FV4000 Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope (20X) and processed using FIJI Max projection. 10. Red eared slider turtle Anthony Wokasch, Aria Zheyuan Huang, Amartya Tashi Mitra, Nathanial Sweet, Paul Maier Close-up of a Red eared slider turtle (Stage 14), Trachemys scripta, optically cleared and stained with acetylated tubulin. Imaged on the LifeCanvas MegaSPIM Light Sheet. 11. Turtle embryo Amartya Tashi Mitra, Aria Zheyuan Huang, Nathaniel Sweet, Anthony Wokasch, Paul Maier Red-eared slider (Trachemys scripta) embryo stained with acetyl-alpha tubulin, labelling neurons. Optically cleared and imaged on LifeCanvas technologies MegaSPIM light sheet microscope.12. Skate embryo Amartya Tashi Mitra Skeletal preparation of little skate (Leucoraja erinacea) embryo labelling cartilaginous tissue in blue and calcified tissue in red. Imaged on Leica MZ10F stereomicroscope, assembled using focus stacking and tile stitching.13. Squid embryo Amartya Tashi Mitra Longfin inshore squid (Doryteuthis pealei) embryo with plasma membrane (CellMask Green) and nuclear (Hoechst) labelling in blue and orange respectively. Imaged on Nikon AXR laser scanning microscope.14. Mouse embryo – Light-sheet Aria Zheyuan Huang, Amartya Tashi Mitra, Nathanial Sweet, Anthony Wokasch, Paul Maier CD-1 mouse embryo at embryonic day 10.5, optically cleared and stained with acetylated tubulin (yellow), imaged on a LifeCanvas MegaSPIM Light Sheet.15. Zebrafish embryo Shivangi Pandey 24hpf Zebrafish embryo stained for Acetylated tubulin (red), Prox1(green) and DAPI(blue). The image was acquired using a Yokogawa W1 (Eclipse) Spinning Disk microscope. The image was processed using ImageJ.16. Skate embryo Shirley Ee Shan Liau and Shivangi Pandey An early-stage skate embryo stained for DAPI (cyan) and Tuj1 (Magenta). The image was acquired using a Yokogawa W1 (Eclipse) Spinning Disk microscope. The image was processed using ImageJ.17. Capitella teleta juvenile Marie Lebel, Shivangi Pandey Regenerating posterior end of a Capitella teleta juvenile seen from the ventral side, 3 days post amputation imaged with a scanning confocal microscope (Nikon AXR NSPARC; 20x, NA 0.8 objective). Nuclei are in blue, neurons in yellow, and serotonergic neurons in red.18. Late squid embryo Marie Lebel, Shivangi Pandey Late squid embryo, with a tentacle amputated 3 days prior, imaged with a spinning disk confocal microscope ( Andor BC43; 10x, NA 0.45 objective) . TRITC (yellow) and CFSE (magenta) were injected in the vasculature a day before amputation. The cyan signal corresponds to the inverted brightfield, highlighting the eyes and chromatophores.19. Squid HCR Amartya Tashi Mitra, Chloe Kuebler, Shirley Ee Shan Liau Longfin inshore squid (Doryteuthis pealei) embryo HCR in-situ. mRNAs for elav, optix, and pcdh17 mRNAs represented in red, blue and orange respectively. Imaged on Olympus FV4000 laser scanning microscope.20. Mouse embryo – confocal Nicole Roos and Anthony Wokasch Mouse E10.5 embryo immunofluorescent staining of Sox9 (cyan), alpha-tubulin (yellow), and endomucin (magenta) protein. Image captured on Evident FV4000 point scanning confocal, lens UPLXAPO4X, na = 0.16, zoom = 1.04. Image processing conducted on Fiji.
In a series of interviews published in Development, we learn more about each fellow’s career path, research interests and aspirations when they start their own lab.
Meet our 2025 PI fellows
Ethan Ewe
Ethan earned his PhD in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Under the mentorship of Prof. Joel Rothman, he investigated the gene regulatory network that controls the specification and differentiation of the C. elegans endoderm. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Oded Rechavi’s lab at Tel Aviv University, where he explores how small RNAs regulate stress responses and govern germline development. Ethan is passionate about uncovering how epigenetic mechanisms – particularly those involving small RNAs and Argonaute proteins – mediate phenotypic plasticity and may facilitate adaptation to environmental change. You can follow Ethan on Bluesky at @ethanewe.bsky.social.
Max earned his PhD at the University of Göttingen, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Gregor Bucher, where he explored how heterochrony shapes the evolution and development of insect brains. He was then awarded a Walter Benjamin Fellowship by the German Research Foundation to investigate how two enigmatic brain regions co-evolve to support novel behaviours, using neotropical butterflies as a model system. He pursued this research in the lab of Dr Stephen Montgomery at the University of Bristol. Currently, Max is a Senior Research Associate developing new tools to study the evolution of neural circuits. He is broadly fascinated by how brains evolve and how neural circuits are shaped and rewired through developmental processes. You can follow Max on Bluesky at @maxfarnworth.bsky.social and find more information at https://linktr.ee/max.farnworth.
Anzy completed her PhD with Brian Hendrich at the Stem Cell Institute at the University of Cambridge. She then joined the lab of Nancy Papalopulu at the University of Manchester and was awarded the Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Wellcome postdoctoral fellowship. Anzy is interested in how dynamic protein expression is decoded by cells and its impact on cell fate decisions in the developing embryo. You can follow Anzy on Bluesky @anzymiller.bsky.social.
Joaquín obtained his PhD in Biology at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City MO, USA. In the laboratory of Dr Piotrowski, he focused on dissecting the role that two signaling pathways – Wnt and Planar Cell Polarity – have during the development of the lateral line in zebrafish, using a combination of mutant analysis, live imaging and immunostaining. Currently, he is a postdoc at the Schier lab at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, Switzerland, where he studies the Rohon-Beard neurons, a population of neurons that for around 150 years were thought to disappear during early development but Joaquín discovered remain until at least juvenile stages. He is interested in leveraging Rohon-beard neurons to study a fundamental question in biology: what are the mechanisms behind the acquisition of the different layers of neuron diversity? You can follow Joaquín on Bluesky at @mads100tist.bsky.social and Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/@mads100tist. Joaquín also helps managing the popular zebrafish-oriented resource ZebrafishRock! @zebrafishrock.bsky.social.
Marlies is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla at Helmholtz Munich, Germany. She completed her PhD research in the lab of Job Dekker at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, USA, where she studied chromosome organization and epigenetic characteristics of mitotic chromosomes. Marlies’ current research focuses on the transcriptional and epigenetic regulation of and by transposable elements in mammalian preimplantation development and stem cells. You can follow Marlies on Bluesky at @marliesoomen.bsky.social.
Giulia is an EMBO postdoctoral fellow in Yanlan Mao’s group at the Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, University College London (UK). Prior to this, she completed her PhD at EMBL Heidelberg (Germany), working with Edward Lemke. A physicist by training, Giulia investigates organism resilience to external perturbations during development and homeostasis, with a focus on mechanical stresses. She combines high-resolution imaging with the development of novel mechanical perturbation tools in Drosophila. You can follow Giulia on Bluesky at @giuliapaci.bsky.social.
Sonya obtained her PhD in molecular biology and genetics from the University of Alberta in Canada, where she used zebrafish to study early vertebrate eye development and disease under the guidance of Dr Andrew Waskiewicz. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) in Vienna, Austria working with Dr Alejandro Burga, using nematodes as a model system to understand the role of mobile and selfish DNA elements in driving the evolution of genomes. Sonya’s research interests lie in understanding the complex relationship between mobile genetic elements and their host genomes in shaping development and evolution. You can follow Sonya on Bluesky at @sonyawiden.bsky.social.
Toshi earned his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Tokyo, Japan, where he studied regulatory mechanisms controlling RNA dynamics and stability, specifically how RNA localization and mRNA decay influence gene expression. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Wendell Lim’s lab at University of California, San Francisco, UCSF. His research focuses on uncovering the design principles of mammalian embryogenesis and reconstituting developmental processes in vitro.
From the nitty-gritty aspects of research to the practice of science communication activities, creativity is an essential part of science. The aim of this webinar is to show that creativity lies at the heart of the practice of science communication and to explore how an explicitly creative approach may help you reach the goals of your science communication project.
In the first part of the webinar, Anatolii will give a conceptual overview of how we might understand creativity in science communication. To that end, he will draw on some parallels between science and art, to unpack several dimensions of creativity relevant to science communication.
The second part will involve practical work, where each of the participants will be given exercises and tools to ideate what their creative science communication project might look like. The webinar will conclude with a facilitated group discussion, through which the participants will join in sharing their insights and try to articulate some practical lessons.
This workshop will be limited to 20 participants working in academic settings. The invitations will be sent out on a first-come-first-served basis.
Anatolii Kozlov is a scientist-turned-philosopher of science and science communicator.
Join us to hear two of Development’s PI fellows speaking on the topic of gene regulation, chaired by James Gahan. One of Development’s first PI fellows, James is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Chromosome Biology at the University of Galway. His research focuses on understanding early animal evolution with a particular interest in gene regulation and chromatin biology.
Wednesday 27 August – 15:00 BST
Anzy Miller (University of Manchester) ‘NGN3 oscillatory expression controls the timing of human pancreatic endocrine differentiation’
Marlies Oomen (Helmholtz Munich, Institute of Epigenetics and Stem Cells) ‘Jumping through evolution; Genome regulation of and by transposable elements during mammalian preimplantation development’
At the speakers’ discretion, the webinar will be recorded to view on demand. To see the other webinars scheduled in our series, and to catch up on previous talks, please visit: thenode.biologists.com/devpres
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