Go inside the lab of Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis from SKI’s Developmental Biology Program.
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What I'm really proud of in relation to my lab and our work is that we have a reputation for doing exemplary research for addressing difficult, but important, questions using cutting-edge tools.
Hey John, so how is the analysis going? This is the miRFP.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
My name is Kat Hadjantonakis, and I'm Chair of the Developmental Biology Program at the Sloan Kettering Institute.
Inside my lab we're interested in how cells regulate their identity and how they act as communities of cells to build the organs of our bodies. What Developmental Biology tries to do is to provide the foundational knowledge for how organs are put together, and that ultimately will allow us to reenact processes of development for the repair of damaged tissues during cancer.
Members of my lab tell me that what they like about being here is the freedom they get to establish their own scientific identity.
Okay so you're moving the cells up to this quadrant.
Yes.
One of the opportunities in my lab is to collaborate both with members of the lab but also outside of the lab. And at the moment, we have ongoing external collaborations with computational biologists, with physicists, and also with mathematical modelers.
I like to bring people in with diverse backgrounds, diverse expertise. I feel that diversity breeds creativity, that creativity gives rise to innovation, and innovation seeds major breakthroughs.
So this is a 3D time-lapse light-sheet; this looks really cool.
Ultimately, the way science is moving forward, it's collaborative, it's multidisciplinary, and I think both our successes and our failures move us forward in terms of trying to tackle some of the “big picture” questions that we're addressing.