Fifth year Tri-Instutional MD-PhD student, Jay Shi, has been awarded an F30 fellowship from the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute for his project "Dynamic Organization of Cell Architecture in Multicellular Tissues."
Jay is conducting his research in Dr. Jennifer Zallen's lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering. His work investigates the relationship between tissue shape and function. Each individual cell needs to coordinate with its nearby and distant neighbors in order to rearrange and ultimately achieve the correct tissue shape. In order to understand this process better and how it can contribute to cancer progression, he will determine how key molecules, like Toll receptors, myosin, and Par-3, cooperate to allow cells to communicate with each other during tissue development.