BME7900 Seminar Series - Joel Boerckel, PhD

Description

We welcome our next speaker, Dr. Joel Boerckel from the University of Pennsylvania. He had a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Orthopedic Surgery and Bioengineering.

 Mechanobiology of Development and Regeneration: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Talk

Abstract: When I was a boy, I loved the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books by RA Montgomery. Now, my laboratory seeks to understand how mechanobiology regulates embryo development and adult regeneration. We study how YAP/TAZ mechanosignaling controls cellular decision making for morphogenesis and regeneration of the skeleton and the vasculature. In this presentation, I’m not sure what we’ll talk about, but it’ll be an adventure.

Bio: Joel received all his degrees in Mechanical Engineering, getting his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2011. His graduate work in tissue engineering led to an interest in angiogenesis and postdoctoral training in vascular biology at the Cleveland Clinic. A serendipitous failure led him to developmental biology. He started his lab at the University of Notre Dame in 2014, and was recruited to the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, where he is jointly appointed as Assistant Professor in the departments of Orthopaedic Surgery and Bioengineering. The Boerckel lab studies the roles of the transcriptional regulators, YAP and TAZ, in mechanotransduction, development, and regeneration of the skeleton and the vasculature. Joel is passionate about accelerating science dissemination and impact through preprints (e.g., bioRxiv) and building supportive scientific communities. Find him on twitter @jboerckel.