EDUCATION:

A.B., Harvard College, 1973 (magna cum laude, Biochemical Sciences)
M.D., Stanford University, 1977
Pediatrics residency years, 1977-1979
Pediatric Cardiology fellowship, 1979-1982 (Children's Hospital, Boston)
Developmental Biology fellowship 1994; 1995-1999 (Massachusetts General Hospital; University of Pennsylvania)

RESEARCH INTERESTS:

1. Assembly, positioning, morphogenetic movements, and patterning of the heart tube in the developing embryo.
2. Patterning of the vascular system.
3. L-R axis specification.

I am a cardiologist with a particular interest in the genetic basis of human birth defects involving the heart and blood vessels. The zebrafish forms a heart tube with the same four segments (sinus venosus, atrium, ventricle, and bulbus arteriosus) as the heart of higher vertebrates. One of my goals is to identify the molecular pathways that determine how the early heart tube is assembled and shaped. Since the heart is the first organ to be asymmetrically positioned in the vertebrate embryo, I also wish to better understand the processes involved in distinguishing left from right during development.

The techniques used in these studies include mutagenesis screens, fate mapping regions of the early gastrula, classical genetics, transplantation, cloning, in situ hybridization, and gene overexpression by mRNA injection. Currently among the most active projects are: an analysis of early heart tube position and heart tube looping direction in fish with various zygotic recessive mutations which perturb gastrulation, an analysis of the temporal and spatial expression domains of several molecules with roles in blood vessel patterning, and detailed characterization of the cardiovascular phenotype of a newly discovered maternal effect recessive mutation, ichabod, which alters head formation.