Affiliation: NYU School of Medicine

Dr. Benjamin Lin completed his BS in biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University and obtained his PhD in biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine under the guidance of Drs. Andre Levchenko and Takanari Inoue. In his graduate studies, he developed microfluidic devices to synthetically reconstitute cell polarity and movement with a small molecule, illustrating the minimal circuitry necessary for directed movement. He further elucidated the signaling pathways utilized by cells to reconcile attractive (chemotactic) and repulsive (contact inhibition of locomotion) cues during directed cell migration. To understand the challenges cells face migrating in vivo, he joined the laboratory of Dr. Ruth Lehmann at the New York University School of Medicine as a postdoctoral fellow to study the conserved migration of primordial germ cells. His current work focuses on understanding the physical mechanisms of cell migration in vivo and how migratory polarity is established, maintained, and oriented by guidance cues.