Skip to main content

Joanna Wysocka wants to understand how genome-encoded regulatory information is integrated with transcriptional machinery and chromatin context during human embryogenesis, and how perturbations in this process lead to disease. Wysocka and her team investigate gene regulatory mechanisms underlying stem cell function, cellular plasticity, and differentiation. Specifically, they use cranial neural crest cells as a paradigm to study how genetic and epigenetic information harbored by transcriptional regulatory elements is decoded into a diversity of functions, behaviors, and morphologies, leading to the emergence of normal-range and disease-associated diversity of human craniofacial form.