Understanding the origins of animal multicellularity

We are an enthusiastic group of scientists trying to understand how life evolves; in particular how multicellular organisms evolved from their single-celled ancestors.Through passion, a bit of ingenuity and tons of collegiality, we want to create new research paths for others to follow.

Vision and Mission

Approach

Aim

We aim big. We address one of the most fundamental biological questions: how multicellular animals evolved from their unicellular ancestors.

We are an evolutionary biology lab. We are a genomics lab. A cell-biological lab. A protistologist lab. We are also a developmental biology lab. And a taxonomists lab! More importantly, we are an engaged team, a family that approaches science with an open mind, that joins forces with the best global partners when needed, and that commit to our values in everything we do.

Our vision is to decipher as much about how animals originated from unicellular relatives to be able to re-create that transition in the lab one day.
This will only be accomplished if we break the current huge bias we have about knowledge from unicellular relatives of animals. Therefore, our mission is to break that asymmetry by generating an open, taxon-wide functional platform of experimentally tractable unicellular relatives of animals for the use of the whole community.