James A. Coffman, Ph.D.
 |
Associate Professor
Regenerative Biology
Environmental Stress Biology
Ph.D. Duke University, Zoology, 1990
B.A. Carleton College, Biology, 1981
The Coffman lab studies the developmental physiology of sea urchins and other echinoderms. We take both ‘inside-out’ and ‘outside-in’ approaches, investigating the inherited genetic and epigenetic regulatory circuitry that controls embryogenesis and regenerative development, and how this circuitry is affected by changing environmental conditions and stress. A long term goal of this research is to elucidate the relationship between ontogeny and cellular responsiveness to environmental conditions, which is key to understanding health problems that originate congenitally as well as age-related developmental diseases such as cancer.
Developmental Physiology and Functional Genomics of Sea Urchin Embryos and Larvae
We are interested in how animal cell fate during development, regeneration, and aging is controlled by the interactions between genetic information, cell signaling, physiology, and the environment. We use sea urchin embryos and larvae as model systems to study this problem because they are accessible to experimental manipulation at many different levels and their genome has been sequenced and annotated. Currently we have a number of projects ongoing in the lab, the details of which are described on our lab webpage. All of our projects provide opportunities for student research involving microscopy and imaging, microinjection, bioinformatics/genomics, and current molecular biological methods.
Robin Ertl, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow
Chris McCarty, M.S., Research Assistant