Our cell and developmental biology group studies a set of very diverse problems, but they have an underlying theme based on understanding the molecular machinery that endows cells with the ability to assume different sets of properties or phenotypes and thus carry out very distinct roles in the organism.

Furthermore, cells change their properties many times during the transition from a single fertilized cell to the thousands and even billions of cells the make up the adult organism. And they do all this in concert with surrounding cells, moving and changing in a pattern that is constant from one individual to the next and changes very slowly over evolutionary time.

Cell and developmental biologists address how cells receive information from their environment (including other cells), how they translate that information into one of thousands of different potential responses through differential activation of genes and finally how the proteins encoded by these genes are assembled into molecular machines that run the activity centers of the cells. Addressing these basic questions involves many different approaches and techniques, and equally challenging, requires the integration of multitudes of independent observations and experiments into a coherent picture of cell function and development.