Journal of Cell Biology is pleased to introduce the newest members of our editorial board. We are grateful to these and all of our board members for their contributions to JCB and service to the cell biology community.
Sarah Cohen
Lipid movement and organelle dynamics
Sarah Cohen is an associate professor of cell biology and physiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She performed her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, where she discovered that parvoviruses hijack host mechanisms for nuclear envelope breakdown normally used during mitosis and apoptosis to gain access to the nucleus. During her postdoctoral training with Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz at the National Institutes of Health, she developed assays for visualizing the trafficking of fluorescent fatty acid analogs within and between cells and methods for live-cell multispectral imaging of 6–8 organelles. Since beginning her lab at UNC, she has focused on identifying proteins at lipid droplet-organelle membrane contact sites and on understanding how organelle communication networks reorganize in response to environmental and developmental cues. Her group recently characterized the functions of proteins at ER-lipid droplet and lipid droplet-mitochondria contact sites. The Cohen lab is also developing tools to study the dynamics and composition of organelle contacts using live-cell imaging and proteomic approaches. Photo courtesy of UNC Chapel Hill.
Cara J. Gottardi
Cell–cell adhesion regulation and Wnt signaling in epithelial barrier repair after injury
Cara J. Gottardi is a professor of pulmonary medicine (primary appointment) and cell and developmental biology (secondary) at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL, USA. She received her PhD in Cell Biology at Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA, where she worked with Michael Caplan on the assembly and sorting of ion-transporting ATPases in polarized epithelia. As a Fulbright fellow, she worked with Daniel Louvard at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, on the roles of newly identified tight junction proteins in epithelial barrier maturation. For postdoctoral research, Cara worked with Barry Gumbiner at Sloan-Kettering in New York, USA, on the nuclear signaling and adhesive functions of β-catenin relevant to epithelial cancers. Cara established her lab at Northwestern in 2004, where her team is developing paradigms of cell–cell adhesion regulation, such as mechanical and chemical modifications to the cadherin–catenin complex that impact epithelial resilience. Her team also studies how epithelia use catenins outside of the cell–cell adhesive complex to control gene expression and cellular differentiation downstream of extracellular cues (e.g., Wnt signals) to drive epithelial regeneration after injury, particularly in the lung. Photo courtesy of Cara Gottardi.
Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis
Regulation of cellular identity, tissue formation, and development
Anna-Katerina (Kat) Hadjantonakis is a member and chair of the Developmental Biology Program and a member of Center for Stem Cell Biology at the Sloan Kettering Institute, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York. She received a BSc in Biochemistry and PhD in Molecular Genetics from Imperial College, London. For her postdoctoral work, she transitioned to the labs of Andras Nagy at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Toronto, and thereafter Virginia Papaioannou at Columbia University, New York, where she generated some of the first embryonic stem cell and mouse models for live-imaging cell behaviors in tissue context. She established her independent research group at the Sloan Kettering Institute in 2004. Her lab leverage genetically engineered mouse and stem cell models, quantitative imaging and genomics approaches to investigate how cells regulate their identity, and how they collaborate to collectively build the tissues of the embryo with a focus on the endoderm, the progenitor of the respiratory and digestive tracts, and their associated organs. She currently also serves as an editor at the journal Development and is a member of the editorial boards of Developmental Cell and Stem Cell Reports. Photo courtesy of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Tetsuro Hirose
Biology of RNA biomolecular condensate formation and function
Tetsuro Hirose is a Professor at the Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences and Director of the Institute for Open and Transdisciplinary Research Initiatives at the University of Osaka, Japan. His research focuses on the architectural roles of long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) in the formation and function of biomolecular condensates. He received his Ph.D. in molecular biology from Nagoya University, Japan. He then joined the laboratory of Joan A. Steitz at Yale University School of Medicine as a postdoctoral fellow, where he studied intronic snoRNP biogenesis during pre-mRNA splicing. In 2005, he established his own laboratory at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tokyo, where he initiated research on functional lncRNAs and discovered architectural lncRNAs that serve as scaffolds for membraneless organelles. He was appointed to the University of Osaka in 2020. Photo courtesy of the University of Osaka.
Katrin Karbstein
Mechanisms of ribosomal assembly, repair, and quality control
Katrin Karbstein received her Ph.D. from Stanford University, where she studied catalysis and conformational changes in RNA enzymes in the laboratory of Dan Herschlag. During her postdoc in Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna’s lab in Berkeley, she developed a biochemical system to study ribosome assembly. In 2006, she joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and in 2010 moved to Scripps Florida. At Scripps Florida, she rose through the ranks to become a full professor at The Scripps Research Institute in 2020. In the summer of 2024, she joined the Biochemistry Department at Vanderbilt University and became a co-leader in the cancer cell biology program at Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center. Dr. Karbstein’s laboratory studies how cells maintain ribosome homeostasis: How do they produce both the correct number of ribosomes and ensure that each ribosome contains all components and is fully functional? In addition, the lab probes how failure of this process changes protein homeostasis and leads to the development and progression of cancers. Her work is funded by the National Institutes of Health and has been recognized with an NSF CAREER award, an HHMI Faculty Scholar Award, and a UF Research Foundation professorship. Photo courtesy of Vanderbilt University.
Megan King
Mechanics and dynamics of chromatin and the nucleus
Megan King is a professor of cell biology at the Yale School of Medicine. She received her B.A. in biochemistry from Brandeis University and her Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biophysics from the University of Pennsylvania. During her postdoctoral training with Günter Blobel at Rockefeller University, she discovered new mechanisms for the targeting and function of integral inner nuclear membrane proteins. Since joining the Cell Biology Department at the Yale School of Medicine in 2009, Megan has continued to investigate the broad array of biological functions that are integrated at the nuclear envelope, from genome integrity to nuclear mechanics to mechanotransduction. In 2018, she teamed up with Patrick Lusk and now co-leads the joint LusKing Lab, which focuses on nuclear mechanics, dynamics, and quality control. Megan is a fellow of the American Society for Cell Biology. Photo courtesy of Megan King.
David Pincus
Mechanisms of protein homeostasis and regulation of the heat shock response
David Pincus is an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago. His laboratory studies how cells sense and adapt to environmental stress, with a focus on spatial proteostasis and the heat shock response. By combining cell biology, molecular genetics, biochemistry, quantitative imaging, and systems-level approaches, his group investigates how cells coordinate adaptive processes across timescales. A central theme of the Pincus laboratory is understanding how disruptions to protein homeostasis and ribosome biogenesis are communicated across cellular compartments through biomolecular condensate-based signaling cascades, shaping transcriptional responses, growth decisions, and cell fate. David received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and his PhD from the University of California, San Francisco, with Peter Walter and Hana El-Samad. He was a Whitehead Fellow before establishing his laboratory at the University of Chicago. Photo courtesy of Abani Neferkara/University of Chicago.
Karin Reinisch
Mechanisms of membrane dynamics and lipid transport
The Reinisch lab was central in the discovery of elongated proteins that span between organelles at contact sites and act as bridges for bulk lipid to move between compartmental membranes, providing an alternate mechanism to vesicle trafficking for bulk lipid movements. Her lab seeks to uncover the molecular mechanisms that underlie lipid transfer by these proteins. Following undergraduate studies in chemistry, Karin remained at Harvard for training in biochemistry and structural biology in the laboratories of William N. Lipscomb (graduate studies) and Stephen C. Harrison (postdoctoral studies), and she established her own laboratory in Yale’s Cell Biology Department in 2001. Early in her career, she worked to understand the interactions between proteins and nucleic acids, moving to topics in membrane trafficking upon her transition to Yale. She has been studying processes at membrane contact sites since 2012. She is David W. Wallace professor of Cell Biology and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024. Aside from leading her lab, her most important responsibility (together with her husband) is caring for the family Afghan hounds. Photo courtesy of Karin Reinisch.
Minna Roh-Johnson
Cell–cell and cell–matrix interactions in development and cancer
Minna Roh-Johnson is an associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah. She received her PhD at the University of North Carolina, where she worked on the regulation of actomyosin contractility networks during early morphogenesis. For her postdoctoral training, she transitioned to cancer cell biology, first at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and then at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. During this training, she dissected how cancer cells interact with macrophages in cell culture, mouse, and zebrafish models. Research in her lab reflects the range of her previous training and currently spans the space between fundamental regulation of cell migration to translational approaches in cancer. Photo courtesy of Rachel Merrill.
Susanna Rosi
Neuroinflammation, neurodegeneration, and cellular aging
Susanna Rosi is a neuroscientist and founding principal investigator at the Altos Labs Bay Area Institute. Susanna earned her PhD at the University of Florence, where she studied the neuroimmune mechanisms underlying Alzheimer’s disease pathology. She completed her postdoctoral training in neural systems, memory, and aging at the University of Arizona, investigating the cellular mechanisms that affect brain plasticity and memory formation during chronic neuroinflammation. Prior to joining Altos Labs, she held the Lewis and Ruth Cozen Chair at UCSF, serving as a professor and the director of Neurocognitive Research in the Brain and Spinal Injury Center. Her research focuses on uncovering the fundamental cellular mechanisms underlying cognitive decline. Dr. Rosi’s work provided the first mechanistic evidence for the sex-dependent role of microglia in brain injury. Furthermore, her lab identified the critical role of peripherally derived monocyte infiltration as a primary driver of synaptic loss and neurotoxicity following brain irradiation and trauma. Additionally, her lab was the first to demonstrate that pharmacological modulation of the integrated stress response can reverse the effects of cellular aging in the brain; by targeting this pathway, her research shows it is possible to rescue cognitive deficits and rejuvenate aged neurons by restoring immune and cellular homeostasis. Photo Courtesy of the University of California, San Francisco.
Elias Spiliotis
Epithelial and neuronal morphogenesis, cytoskeleton (septins), membrane traffic, cell division, and migration
Elias Spiliotis is a professor of cell biology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University, where he studied the assembly and ER quality control of the major histocompatibility complex class I under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Edidin. As a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, he worked in Dr. James Nelson’s laboratory, investigating the functions of septin GTPases in cell division and polarized membrane traffic. In 2008, Elias established his independent research group at Drexel University in Philadelphia, focusing on the cell biology of the septin cytoskeleton. He moved to the University of Virginia in 2023. His laboratory explores septins as a regulatory module of spatial organization in cell biology, pursuing fundamental questions in epithelial and neuronal morphogenesis, membrane traffic, and cell migration and invasion. Photo courtesy of Elias Spiliotis.
Matthew Welch
Pathogen–host interactions and regulation of the cytoskeleton and membrane trafficking
Matthew Welch’s research focuses on the cellular structures that govern shape and movement and the mechanisms used by microbial pathogens to exploit these structures during infection. Matt’s interest in cell structure began during his graduate work with David Drubin at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied the regulation of actin cytoskeleton function in yeast. As a postdoc with Tim Mitchison at UCSF, he identified the Arp2/3 complex as the actin-nucleating factor that drives actin-based motility of the bacterial pathogen Listeria monocytogenes. Matt is currently professor and co-chair of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research has two interrelated goals. The first is to study the function and regulation of the cytoskeleton and membranes in cell and organelle shape and movement. The second is to examine how diverse bacterial and viral pathogens exploit the cytoskeleton and membranes during host cell invasion, intracellular movement, and cell-to-cell spread during infection. Matt’s other editorial experience includes having served as editor-in-chief of the ASCB journal Molecular Biology of the Cell from 2020 to 2024. Photo courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley.
Shan Zha
DNA damage response and nonhomologous end joining
Shan Zha is the James A. Wolff professor of pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center and an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation. Her laboratory investigates the mechanisms of DNA damage response and DNA double-strand break repair, with a particular focus on nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ). Using genetically engineered mouse models and quantitative live-cell imaging, her group has defined the physiological consequences of DNA repair defects on immune development, lymphomagenesis, and the hematologic toxicities of cancer therapy. Over the past decade, her lab has generated and characterized multiple models with NHEJ deficiencies and catalytically inactive mutations in ATM, ATR, DNA-PKcs, and PARPs, revealing catalysis-coupled allosteric regulation of key repair factors. Most recently, her team uncovered a primate-specific role for Ku and DNA-PKcs in RNA biology and RNA-mediated innate immune responses, opening new directions at the intersection of RNA and DNA metabolism. Photo courtesy of Frank Chen.
