Jeremiah Zartman

Biography

Developing new strategies for building tissues and treating degenerative tissue diseases requires investigating animal development from an engineering perspective. Probing animal development with quantitative tools can potentially improve traditional methods of tissue engineering as well as inspire completely novel methods for creating synthetic organs. In the Zartman lab, we are focused on the systematic analysis of chemical and mechanical signaling at the tissue scale, including developing computational models of how cells self-organize into organs of the correct shape and size. We address these questions using experiments and modeling in systems such as Drosophila that are amenable to sophisticated genetic approaches, live imaging and in vitro culture. The main objective of the lab is to synthesize mechanistic models of two fundamental processes during development: 1. the control of organ growth, and 2. the organization of cellular sheets into three-dimensional structures.

Chemical and biological engineers can contribute significantly toward understanding how organ size and shape are regulated by utilizing a diverse toolkit of skills: solving reaction-diffusion and transport problems, utilizing control and decision theory toward the reverse engineering of transcriptional networks, applying quantitative and statistical methods in the optimization of next-generation growth media for organ development in vitro, and employing experimental knowledge in the analysis of soft materials.

Publications

N. Yakoby, C. A. Bristow, D. Gong, X. Schafer, J. Lembong, J. J. Zartman, M. S. Halfon, T. Schupbach and S. Y. Shvartsman. Dev Cell 15, 5:725-737, 2008.

J. J. Zartman, J. S. Kanodia, N. Yakoby, X. Schafer, C. Watson, K. Schlichting, C. Dahmann, and S. Y. Shvartsman. Development, 17:2903-2911, 2009.

J. J. Zartman, L. S. Cheung, M. G. Niepielko, C. Bonini, B. Haley, N. Yakoby and S. Y. Shvartsman. Phys. Biol., 4:18947, 2011.

J. J. Zartman and S. Y. Shvartsman. Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, 1:231-246, 2010.

S.-J. Yan, J. J. Zartman, M. Zhang,A. Scott, S. Y. Shvartsman and W. X. Li. Molecular Systems Biology, 5:278, 2009.

J. J. Zartman, J. S. Kanodia, N. Yakoby, X. Schafer, C. Watson, K. Schlichting, C. Dahmann and S. Y. Shvartsman. Gene Expr Patterns, 1:31-36, 2009.

Awards