Principles of cellular behavior: integrating cellular structure, dynamics, and decision making

Ben completed his undergraduate degree in Physics at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He then worked in the lab of Justin Taraska at the NIH as a postbac IRTA, focused primarily on developing computational image analysis approaches and using advanced microscopy to study exocytosis and endocytosis. He next obtained his PhD in Biophysics at UC Berkeley working in Nicole King’s lab. His graduate research investigated the evolutionary origins of animal development and the evolutionary cell biology of morphogenesis through the study of the cellular and biophysical mechanisms by which choanoflagellates, the closest living relatives of animals, control the 3D shapes of their colonies. He is currently a postdoc in Wallace Marshall’s lab at UCSF working to understand the regulation of sensorimotor activity in the ciliate Euplotes, a unicellular organism that walks across surfaces using leg-like appendages composed of cilia.

Speaker: Ben Larson, UC San Francisco