Her interdisciplinary approach to science, her fearlessness to tackle her questions with new approaches, and certainly her style are things I can only hope to emulate. Congrats to Lucy - so well deserved!

Which was of course the best decision. I'm certainly not biased when I say Stanford Dev Bio is the best place ever to get a PhD. Full of curious, brilliant, and supportive mentors like Lucy.

Lucy was the one who called me to tell me I got into her department at Stanford for grad school, and I had to say yes on the phone right then and there!

But like all of Lucy's fascinating and impressive stories, I didn't take it as a brag, but rather my first data point that Lucy was an incredible person to know, learn more about, and be influenced by.

When I interviewed for grad school at Stanford, it was just a few days after Lucy had won the Presidential Medal of Science, and I was greeted by a story and a photo of her with President Obama when I first walked into her office.

Oh no!! Sorry Jongmin

Thank you so much!

Yes! I believe I have filled out the form

These posts about my work and why it's important are reaching outside the bluesky bubble. Go do it!

I also wrote up a lay summary of the manuscript we just uploaded to biorxiv on facebook. These two interactions with my local community got tons of engagement, and I am now being featured by my old middle school on their fb page and a local news group called AllOnGeorgia.

Full story here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

But integration isn’t sufficient anywhere. In sog mutants (where BMP is low and broad), cells outside the normal domain exhibit higher than normal integrated BMP but activate less transcription.

How? The transcription factor Zen modulates the signaling threshold for activation, lowering the barrier for transcription activation.

We found that gene expression domains are best predicted by integrated BMP signaling over time, not instantaneous levels, enabling rapid responses to small changes in signaling levels.

We made a live reporter of BMP activity coupled with MS2 reporters of target gene transcription to understand how cells convert dynamic signaling into gene expression domains.

Full story here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thus, cells interpret dynamic morphogen signals through the combined action of temporal integration and spatial competence, providing a framework for robust pattern formation on fast developmental timescales.

But integration isn’t sufficient anywhere. In sog mutants (where BMP is low and broad), cells outside the wild type domain exhibit higher than normal integrated BMP but activate less transcription.