Ella Tour

Ella is a teaching professor/researcher who received her PhD from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has mapped activation and repression domains in the Ultrabithorax protein of Drosophila. She has recently been studying a long nocoding RNA that regulates the expression pattern of the Ultrabithorax gene in Drosophila embryos.

Dmitry Karachentsev

Dmitry is a project scientist who received his PhD from the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology in Moscow, Russia. He is studying molecular pathways controlling epidermal development and regeneration. He designed an assay to identify novel extracellular 'damage' ligands that activate wound induced signaling pathways. Dmitry has also identified a new gene that regulates the transcription response to cuticle puncture wounds in flies. He has also been studying how the Toll signaling pathway regulates genes that mediate epidermal barrier repair in Drosophila.

Sandra Diaz Garcia

Sandra is a postdoc who received her PhD in Biochemistry, Biology, Biomedicine and Biotechnology from “Centro de Biología Molecular-Severo Ochoa, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid”. She is interested in understanding the spatio-temporal transcriptional regulation of several genes that are activated in epidermal cells surrounding Drosophila wound sites. Many genetic pathways that regulate the transcription response to epidermal puncture wounds have been identified, but the interactive relationships among the pathways are unknown. To carry out this analysis, Sandra is developing new methods to visualize the transcriptional activation of wound induced genes in real time in living embryonic epidermal cells.

Anita Hermann

Anita is the manager for the McGinnis lab. She is working with Ella to probe the functions of long noncoding RNAs in the regulation of Hox gene expression patterns.