Professor Melissa Gardner

The Gardner lab uses a combination experimental and computational approach to dissect molecular mechanisms for how microtubule lengths are regulated inside of cells, and for how force signaling acts to ensure proper chromosome segregation during mitosis. They use biophysical computational modeling to better integrate and understand our experimental observations, make new experimental predictions, and to test whether their proposed cellular mechanisms are physically reasonable. Overall, they are a cellular biophysics laboratory that combines cell biology tools with biophysical methods to shed new light on the regulation of microtubule dynamics, and to dissect forces in mitosis.