Defining the cellular logic of organ architecture
How do local cellular decisions generate organ-scale form?
During organismal development, individual cells make decisions based on dynamic local signals, forces, and constraints, yet organs emerge with remarkably reproducible shapes that are essential to their lifelong functions.
We investigate how mechanical and chemical interactions between epithelial, mesenchymal, and extracellular systems coordinate these local behaviors to generate form and robust architectural stability at the tissue scale. In the mammalian intestine, this natural choreography plays out in the emergence of millions of stereotyped tissue folds - villi and crypts - structures that are essential for lifelong digestive and organismal health. By integrating long-term live imaging of whole mammalian tissues with genetic and biophysical perturbations, we study the formation of these structures and aim to define the rules that link cell-scale dynamics to the emergence and stabilization of organ-scale geometry. Defining this rulebook will unlock a deeper understanding of congenital birth defects, new routes for targeting tissue architecture in diseases where it fails, and enable the generation of more complex organoid systems to study human development in a dish.
How do tissues remember their shape?
When our tissues are damaged, their architecture is often lost, leaving behind simplified or scarred structures with reduced functionality.
In contrast, the gastrointestinal tract has the remarkable capacity to reconstruct complex form after injury, returning to an organized, functional state. We study how tissues retain or recover the information required to rebuild architecture, how these are coordinated at the cell level, and why these programs are enabled in some contexts but absent in many diseases that lead to persistent atrophy. By defining these principles, we aim to reveal how architectural information is encoded, preserved, and reactivated in living tissues with the long term goal of defining cellular modules that can be program to restore or reinforce organ form.