We are thrilled to celebrate Favour Ononiwu’s successful defense of her Ph.D. dissertation last Friday. Favour joined our program during the challenging days of the COVID-19 pandemic and has overcome many hurdles on her way to this milestone. Her perseverance, creativity, and scientific rigor have left a mark on our lab and on the field of developmental cell biology.
She talked about her recent work titled “Functionally Essential and Structurally Diverse: Insights into the Zebrafish Left-Right Organizer’s Cilia via Optogenetic IFT88 Perturbation and Array Tomography”that sheds new light on how cilia contribute to the development of the zebrafish Left-Right Organizer (LRO), known as the Kupffer’s Vesicle (KV).
We are excited to see where her career takes her next, knowing she will continue to advance science with creativity and determination.
This summer, our lab welcomed three talented undergraduate researchers who made impressive contributions to our studies on cytoskeletal and cell junction dynamics in early development.
Shahina Alibekova, a SOURCE Scholar from Syracuse University, worked under the guidance of graduate student Yiling Lan to investigate centrosome dynamics in early embryos.
Athena Allred (Arizona) and Carys Timpson (Cambridge) worked with Dr. Heidi Hehnly and postdoctoral fellow Yan Wu to study tight junction assembly during left-right organizer development and its relationship to cytoskeletal dynamics. Their joint work culminated in a co-authored poster presentation.
Athena was supported through our NSF-REU award for Microscopy.
Shahina received funding from the Syracuse University SOURCE program.
Carys joined us as a visiting undergraduate scholar from Cambridge University.
Congratulations to Athena, Carys, and Shahina for a productive and successful summer of research!
Hehnly Lab postdoc Yan Wu looking beautiful with her poster at Syracuse University’s Office of Research postdoc poster session. She presented on her recent study featured in Development.
