About

Ever since beginning graduate work in the Bender lab at Harvard Medical School, I have been interested in how a fertilized egg self-assembles itself into an animal. As a postdoc with Eric Wieschaus at Princeton, I began work on ß-catenin, exploring its dual roles in cell adhesion and Wnt signaling. Since the lab at UNC began in 1992, we have continued and expanded this work, taking advantage of the exceptionally strong community here in cell and developmental biology, and the cutting edge imaging equipment available here. Outside the lab, I live in the woods near Saxapahaw with my spouse and dog (our two daughters, both UNC grads are now a social worker and a 2nd grade teacher), and am obsessed with native wildflowers and with reducing global inequities in education and health care. Ask me about my trips to Haiti, or about that mystery flag which is flying outside my office.

We work at the interface between cell and developmental biology, focusing on the epithelial tissues that form the basic architectural unit of our bodies and of those of other animals. We explore how the machinery mediating cell adhesion, cytoskeletal regulation and Wnt signaling regulates cell fate and tissue architecture in development and disease.