Meet Our New Faculty

Jennifer Kong

From crustaceans to mice, Dr. Jennifer Kong has spent her career watching animals grow and has become fascinated with the signals that drive and organize embryonic development. With much excitement, the Kong Lab opens its doors in January 2023. Utilizing a combination of cell-based knockout screens, mouse genetics, and biochemical assays, the Kong Lab strives to understand the mechanisms that determine how cells respond to these guiding embryonic signals. To learn more, check out the Kong Lab website here.

Claudia Vasquez

During Dr. Claudia Vasquez’s PhD at MIT, she learned about “mechanobiology” – a subfield of biology interested in understanding the mechanical inputs and outputs of molecules, cells, and tissues. Therein she found a field where she could apply her disparate interests in biology, biochemistry, chemistry, math and physics to understand how on/off regulation of contractile myosin machinery coordinates cell shape change is required for mechanical coherence during tissue morphogenesis for her post doc. As a postdoc at Stanford, she was motivated to understand how the physical mechanisms cells use to construct a hollow opening, or lumen, a prevalent organ motif.  Dr. Vasquez also developed a tool to help visualize the molecular-scale architecture of cell-cell contacts using cryo-electron tomography. Together, these projects form the basis of the Vasquez lab to uncover the emergent properties that cells use to build higher-order tissue structures found in organs.  The Vasquez lab will leverage the ample toolbox of Drosophila to ask questions about epithelial cell shape diversity in vivo in fly organs, starting with the developing renal system.