Sharad Ramanathan, PhD

Our laboratory studies how multi-potent cells make developmental decisions and how the nervous system makes behavioral decisions.

We ask how multi-potent cells receive and process signals to build correctly patterned complex tissues of the correct size. Further, we ask how the underlying signaling pathways and gene regulatory networks evolve to produce novel cell types and whether we can take advantage of this evolutionary history to re-engineer these networks. Our final goal is to demonstrate our understanding by patterning and building tissues. Our experiments focus on early human and mouse development.

We ask how nervous systems process environmental signals to determine animal behavior. We aim to dissect the nervous system to identify key nodes in the network and demonstrate our understanding by taking control of the animal’s behavior by directly manipulating neural activity. Our experimental focus is on the nervous system of the nematode C. elegans.

We bring together developmental biologists, cell biologists, neurobiologists, physicists, and bioengineers to achieve our goals.