Sally Moody, PhD, chair of the Department of Anatomy and Regenerative Biology and professor of anatomy and regenerative biology at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, took a six-month sabbatical starting in January 2018 to finish research for a study on the gene network that regulates neural plate size and regional specification.
Moody is working in Israel in the lab of co-principal investigator Abraham Fainsod, PhD, professor in the Department of Developmental Biology and Cancer Research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“We are trying to understand how the nervous systems of embryos … scale to the size of the embryos,” Moody said of her work. “So the nervous system of a bigger embryo is going to be bigger than one of a smaller embryo. … But there has to be a mechanism to regulate exactly how big the different organs are.” The work combines Fainsod’s expertise in cell signaling pathways that regulate the induction of the nervous system with Moody’s knowledge of the transcription factors that regulate the beginning steps of neural development. In January, Moody also was appointed to serve as chair of the Department of Anatomy and Regenerative Biology.
