Heidi is curious about how higher-level multicellular functions arise from protein-protein interactions. During her PhD with Dr. Michael Elowitz at Caltech, she studied how highly similar signaling proteins important in mammalian development flexibly encode non-redundant pathway inputs, via their competitive binding of a shared pool of cell surface receptors. She is now a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Ahmad (Mo) Khalil and Dr. Mary Dunlop’s groups at Boston University, exploring how engineering adhesion molecules affects overall aggregate properties and long-term stability, providing tunable platforms for multicellular synthetic biology.
