Erica Hutchins, PhD

Lab Head

Erica Hutchins, University of California, San Francisco

Pronouns: she/her

I opened my lab as an Assistant Professor at UCSF in the Department of Cell and Tissue Biology in July 2022. The goal of my research is to map how post- transcriptional mechanisms control cell state transitions in vivo, using vertebrate neural crest as a model. Neural crest cells are an essential stem cell population in the vertebrate embryo. During development, these cells must undergo coordinated induction, specification, and epithelial—mesenchymal transition (EMT) events to migrate and ultimately develop into a wide range of cell types that contribute to the adult organism. Dysregulated post-transcriptional regulatory linkages in neural crest can lead to congenital malformations and cancer in humans, and a thorough understanding of the mechanisms underlying these fundamental processes can provide new therapeutic targets for biomedical intervention. By leveraging systems-level approaches and cutting-edge developmental biology techniques to understand how neural crest cell state transitions are achieved post-transcriptionally to drive cell fate choices, we can begin to understand how these programs fail during development or may be hijacked during disease.