Kasza Lab Awarded NIH MIRA Grant to Advance Research on Tissue Morphogenesis

Professor Karen Kasza’s lab in Columbia University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering has received a five-year renewal of the Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The $2.19 million grant will support ongoing research into the mechanisms that coordinate cell behaviors during embryonic development.

The funded project investigates how cells, often located far apart in the embryo, communicate to build tissues and organs in a highly coordinated fashion. To explore this, the Kasza Lab uses fruit fly embryos as a model system, leveraging in toto light-sheet microscopy to capture dynamic, whole-embryo movies of more than 6,000 cells in real time.

The team combines traditional molecular genetics with innovative optogenetic tools to manipulate mechanical forces and probe how signals propagate rapidly across developing tissues. This research aims to uncover fundamental principles of cell coordination and shed light on how disruptions in these processes may contribute to congenital anomalies.