Best wishes for all involved in final exams and courses as your respective Fall semesters wrap up! Congrats to the team of EMBRIO members that organized, chaired, and presented an Integrative Cell and Developmental Systems Biology Mini-Symposium last week at CellBio 2025 in Philadelphia (see below). Don't forget to share your input, preferences, and availability for our annual summer events - quick online survey (details below). A reminder that we won't meet this afternoon for All-Hands during finals (we have a focused proposal discussion happening this afternoon. Please use this Google spreadsheet for coordinating interest and activity around a number of funding opportunities associated with EMBRIO and/or contact Brent, laddb@purdue.edu .) We are balancing the spring semester All-Hands Lab sessions between research thrust updates and working proposal team sessions. Separate calendar invites for these sessions with dedicated Zoom links have been emailed out to the membership (more on this below). Purdue EMBRIO Faculty: SUMMER UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP (SURF) program is accepting faculty project postings details below.

The EMBRIO Mini-Symposium at Cell Bio25 was a great success with around 100 attendees and an eight member EMBRIO team involved. Thanks to the entire team for organizing, chairing, and presenting your cutting-edge research to the ASCB community! (and the team had the added bonus of touring the Mullins Lab at UPenn 🙂 ).

EMBRIO Integrative Cell and Developmental Systems Biology Mini-Symposium @CellBio 2025 – An ASCB | EMBO Meeting
December 6–10, 2025 | Philadelphia, PA

Mary Mullins and Qing Deng, Symposium Chairs

•Aggregation and DNA binding of Dorsal/NF-κB in early embryos — Gregory Reeves
•Signal processing and robustness of the BMP network during zebrafish embryogenesis — Nissa Larson
•Reactive Oxygen Species Counteract Zebrafish Wound Contraction and Promote Wound Healing — Chang Ding
•Reverse engineering organ size and shape control through the integration of quantitative experiments and multi-scale computational modeling — Jeremiah Zartman
•Investigating cytoskeletal and cellular dynamics during morphogenesis in the zebrafish — Bakary Samasa
•AI-powered acceleration and parameter tuning for computational modeling — LINLIN LI

Use this brief online poll to capture your availability, plans and preferences, as well as input for training topics: https://purdue.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bkIw8bHUboD9Qwu

A joint EMBRIO BII NSF - Notre Dame (RECODE NSF) one day symposium and poster session has been proposed focused on "Advancing Morphogenetic Biosciences and Bioengineering”, coupled with a multi-day training at the intersection of AI-levered computational modeling, quantitative biology, and bioengineering (e.g. https://sai.nd.edu/). The Symposium will feature EMBRIO speakers, along with speakers from Notre Dame, and invited Key Notes. Proposed to be hosted at our partners at University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, EMBRIO will organize and help provide transportation and lodging for Purdue members to attend, as well as reimburse travel for EMBRIO trainees from our partner institutions to participate.

We will continue with Mondays bi-weekly 3-4pm ET (calendar invites will be sent out soon. The intention this spring semester is to have one session a month dedicated to research thrust updates and one session a month dedicated to working proposal team(s) collaborating on new funding proposals that leverage EMBRIO (trainees are welcome to attend/participate in these sessions).

Purdue EMBRIO Faculty: SUMMER UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP (SURF)- Accepting project postings!

Purdue’s SURF program invites faculty to mentor outstanding undergraduates in an 11-week paid summer research experience at the West Lafayette or Indianapolis campuses.

By mentoring a SURF student, faculty help shape future researchers while contributing to student growth and professional development.

EMBRIO covers the PI amount of the internship cost and a housing stipend for non-Purdue students (your department and college, depending on the agreement, kick in the other 2/3 of the cost)

Please let Brent know if you submit an EMBRIO project and indicate under the Centers/Institutes checkboxes that the project is an EMBRIO project. Submit project postings here

Brent T. Ladd, Senior Research Program Manager, EMBRIO Institute

Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University

Office: Hall for Discovery Learning and Research, Ste. 203
207 S. Martin Jischke Drive
West Lafayette, IN 47907

laddb@purdue.edu