I am fascinated by the diverse shapes of animal embryos and organs, and how cells work collectively to make functional tissues in a highly choreographed manner.  

During my PhD at UC Berkeley, I tackled a long-standing and central challenge in development: how do organs acquire their proper shape? I created new techniques and applied quantitative approaches to uncover how mechanical forces from the extracellular matrix (ECM), cell dynamics, and cytoskeletal properties cooperate to shape organs.

As a founding postdoc of Dr. Zernicka-Goetz’s new lab at Caltech, I switched to mammalian embryology and investigated one of its fundamental questions: how do embryos establish their body axis? My findings revealed an unexpected early asymmetry in a specialized ECM structure, the basement membrane, in mouse embryos, which is also conserved in cultured human embryos and a stem cell-derived human embryo model.

More recently, I integrated single-cell transcriptomics, live imaging, and lineage tracing to tackle a central challenge in mammalian development: the biology of implantation. My work revealed a novel, intermediate state of pluripotency in vivo and an unexpected cellular origin of the placenta.