RESEARCH PROGRAMS
Many pregnancies are lost during the earliest stages of development, and millions of children worldwide are born each year with congenital organ anomalies. Yet we still do not understand how cells organize themselves to build human organs—or how disruptions in this process lead to disease.
We build human tissues from stem cells to uncover how cells coordinate, organize, and transform into organ architecture. By recreating human development in the laboratory, we aim to discover the mechanisms underlying congenital disorders and create new opportunities to predict, prevent, and ultimately repair developmental defects.
01
Given the right conditions, human stem cells can self-organize into remarkably complex tissues. We guide this process with precisely defined chemical and physical cues to recreate key stages of human organ development. Our microchip platforms generate thousands of these tissues in parallel, allowing us to study organ formation at unprecedented scale.
02
We combine high-resolution imaging with computational analysis to turn organ development into measurable, predictive data. These tools reveal how cells acquire identity, coordinate their behaviors, and assemble into tissues with the correct architecture.
Confocal imaging
Live-cell imaging
Image analysis
Topological tissue analysis
Deep-learning phenotyping
03
During embryonic development, a subset of cells becomes endoderm, the precursor to many of our internal organs. From this shared tissue emerge the lungs, esophagus, stomach, liver, pancreas, and intestine. We reconstitute these early developmental states to ask how cells choose which organ to build, and how they acquire the architecture that organ requires
04
We recreate human disease in mini-organs to understand when and how development goes wrong. By combining patient-derived stem cells, genetic perturbations, high-resolution imaging, and machine learning, we can track disease as it emerges across thousands of tissues—and ask whether abnormal development can be predicted, prevented, or restored.
