Announcing the 2023 CSCI Seed Fund Competition Winners: Emily Mace, PhD and Dieter Egli, PhD

Emily Mace, PhD

Associate Professor of Pediatric Immunology (in Pediatrics)

“Generation of novel tools to study cell cycle from pluripotency to differentiation”

In the adult, innate lymphoid cells are continuously produced from stem cells. Despite the importance of this continuous generation, there is much that is still unknown about how stem cells with the potential to become any blood cell are directed to become mature immune cell. The goal of this project is to develop new tools for fluorescent labeling and targeted degradation of proteins of interest that regulate cell cycle and proliferation. Our aim is to better understand how cellular dynamics are regulated throughout the course of differentiation of human immune cells from pluripotent stem cells.

Dieter Egli, PhD

Associate Professor of Developmental Cell Biology

“DNA replication dynamics and genome fragility in pancreatic beta cells”

How cell divisions are counted, is one of the fundamental unanswered questions in cell and developmental biology. Likewise, the function of vast noncoding DNA regions in the genome remains unknown. These regions typically are late replicating and fragile. We hypothesize that fragile sites integrate replication stress signals and affect decisions on cell cycle progression. In this project, we will begin to interrogate fragile site function in cell cycle decisions in the pancreatic lineage.

Please join us in congratulating the winners of this year’s CSCI Seed Fund competition!