Current Research and Scholarly Interests
I am a biologist with broad biomedical research experience, ranging from longitudinal studies of cognitive aging to clinical trials of autoimmune disease - but my favorite biological problems have broad relevance to a variety of cell types, processes, and organisms. As a Ph.D. student in cell biology, I studied how budding yeast cells track chemical signals, a process that is critical for feeding, fertilization, and development (among many other things) in a wide variety of eukaryotes. As a postdoctoral fellow, I currently investigate actomyosin-independent mechanisms of cytokinesis in the alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.