Research Interests

I am a experimental geneticist who is interested in development and regeneration. In my laboratory, we have been been using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as an experimental model to address the following questions: How and why does development limit the regeneration of certain tissues? How is an appropriately scaled regenerative response produced? How is tissue regeneration coordinated with developmental growth and differentiation? How is tissue function altered during regeneration?

In addition we have been exploring the relationship between tumorigenesis and regeneration.  Tissue regeneration and tumorigenesis share many common features, yet they produce very different final tissue phenotypes. We would like to understand how these two process intersect, and the genes that contribute to their divergent outcomes. Our ongoing work has generated new insights into how tissues regenerate and the regenerative signals that drive tumor formation and neoplastic transformation. This observation that inappropriate regenerative activity my contribute to tumorigenesis has inspired us to begin examining other diseases such as asthma and inflammatory bowel disease, where we think that dysregulated regenerative activity may also contribute to disease pathology.  For more information, please visit my website.