MAE Colloquium: Nandan Nerurkar (Columbia)

Mechanobiology of vertebrate gut morphogenesis

To produce an entire complex organism from a single cell, the embryo undergoes profound - yet precisely organized - physical transformations during development. This requires coordination of genetic and molecular cues with cell behaviors that ultimately regulate the mechanical process of shaping tissues and organs. This seminar will describe our efforts to study integration between mechanical and biological aspects of intestinal development, focusing on a mechanical instability that bends the embryonic intestine into compact loops. This process is essential for orderly packing of the intestine within the body, and errors in this process result in severe, poorly understood birth defects. We will briefly consider mechanical feedback in this system, and broadly, how evolution acts upon tissue mechanics to enact morphological diversity across species.
 

Bio: Nandan Nerurkar joined Columbia University as an assistant professor of biomedical engineering in 2018 after completing his postdoctoral training in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He received a B.S. in biological engineering from University of Maryland, College Park in 2003, an M.S. in biomedical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 2005, and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering & applied mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010.

Nerurkar investigates how cells organize themselves into tissues and organs during embryonic development through an integration of biochemical and biomechanical processes. Using live in vivo imaging, gene misexpression, and a combination of computational and experimental mechanics in the developing chick embryo, his research group focuses on understanding how forces that shape the embryo are specified by developmental signals, how these forces in turn influence tissue growth and stem cell differentiation, and how birth defects arise when these processes go awry.