Wilson Lab
Principal Investigator: Maxwell Zane Wilson
Institution: University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA)
Primary Subfield: Molecular & Cell Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary In the first two weeks of development, the human embryo breaks symmetry twice, transforming itself from a uniform ball of cells into a highly-patterned, spatially organized set of tissues. Although decades of elegant genetics and biochemistry in non-human model organisms have uncovered many of the essential signaling proteins and pathways for embryonic patterning at this early stage, a lack of tools for directly manipulating the signaling in time and space, as well as limitations to working with human embryos, have limited our ability to understand how these early patterning events arise in humans. Thus, my laboratory seeks to develop engineering strategies to (1) understand what patterns of signaling activity encode extracellular information, and (2) determine how these patterns are decoded at the tissue level to drive high fidelity collective cell fate decisions in human embryonic stem cells. This proposal brings together many recent advances in stem cell and molecular engineering to decode how spatiotemporal signaling and embryo size instruct tissue fate patterning. We leverage advances in 2D micropatterning, 3D bioprinting, cellular optogenetic control over deve…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01HD108803-05: Optical dissection of human embryonic germ layer patterning mechanisms using microengineered stem cell models (2026)
- 1R21CA301306-01: Dissecting the structure-function relationship of the Wnt destruction complex condensate (2025)
- 5R01HD108803-04: Optical dissection of human embryonic germ layer patterning mechanisms using microengineered stem cell models (2025)
- 5R01HD108803-03: Optical dissection of human embryonic germ layer patterning mechanisms using microengineered stem cell models (2024)
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