Dr. Nathan Lord joined the Department of Computational and Systems Biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in 2020. The Lord Lab aims to understand how embryos encode instructions for their cells in spatially-resolved patterns of signaling and gene expression. To this end, the Lord Lab is building new optogenetic methods that enable on-demand generation of signaling patterns in stem cells, organoids and embryos. Easily programmable genetic perturbations— made possible by TALENs and CRISPR nucleases— revolutionized developmental biology. By bringing similar innovations to signaling patterns, the Dr. Lord hopes to discover new quantitative principles that enable us to engineer precise and reliable synthetic tissues. In collaboration with the PittSpace initiative, Dr. Lord hopes to extend this work to develop new, light-based methods for controlling cellular behaviors in low Earth orbit conditions. The Lord Lab is supported by an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and a New Initiative Grant from the Charles E. Kaufmann Foundation.
