I am an interdisciplinary cell biologist and my research interests focus on how cells reorganize in space and time to enable complex behaviors like swimming, crawling, and dividing. These dynamic behaviors are driven by a highly conserved polymer network, the cytoskeleton. Defects in the patterning of cytoskeletal structures cause a range of human diseases including ciliopathies, birth defects, and cancer. While the molecular components and general principles of cytoskeletal assembly are well studied, much less is known about how cellular structures remodel to enable distinct cell states and functions or how remodeling pathways emerge and change in evolution.

My research seeks to address this gap by leveraging interdisciplinary tools from cell biology, biophysics, and evolutionary biology combined with high-resolution light microscopy in a powerful emerging model system, chytrid fungi. Chytrids retain and rapidly remodel a complex microtubule cytoskeleton that was lost in other fungal lineages and are important ecologically as decomposers and devastating amphibian pathogens. Together, this new model system and interdisciplinary tools will allow us to address fundamental questions of how cells robustly establish and maintain their organization, how these mechanisms arose in evolution, and how they fail in different disease contexts.