We are a developmental biology lab interested in understanding how groups of stem cells self-assemble and organize into functional tissues and organisms.  Half of our projects are built around basic developmental biology questions - examining cell populations giving rise to mucociliary tissues and the eye, and how signaling pathways in these tissues may be used to treat airway and vision diseases in a regenerative medicine context.

The other projects in the lab are build around using developing tissues as living materials in applied contexts - to design biosensors, biological robots, and self-healing biohybrid devices.  This work combines aspects of stem cell biology, traditional robotics, and simulation to generate new classes of living machines for use in both ecological and biomedical contexts.

Ultimately, our research questions inform one another.  Uncovering the signals controlling stem cell differentiation and organization lets us better design living materials in our applied work.  Likewise, by building synthetic and composite biorobots, we often uncover new self-organization principles that are important in embryonic development and birth defects.