Sisson’s Research Presented in Boston, St. Louis

Assistant Professor of Biology Barbara Sisson presented her research at the annual meeting of the Midwest Society for Developmental Biology in St. Louis in September, 2013. Her work, part of a collaboration with four other scientists, was entitled: “A unique role of *glypican4* and *wnt5b* in zebrafish craniofacial morphogenesis.”

Sisson began her research at the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago Research Center while conducting postdoctoral research. Sisson says, “I finished the research here at Ripon and continue to collaborate with my postdoctoral mentor Jacek Topczewski and Rodney Dale who was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab at the same time with me and is now a faculty member at Loyola University Chicago.”

In addition to Sisson’s St. Louis presentation, Topczewski also presented their research at the 36th annual meeting of the Society for Craniofacial Genetics and Developmental Biology in Boston in October.

According to the Research Center’s website, the lab’s efforts focus on the factors that shape the zebrafish head skeleton in order to hopefully better understand the mechanisms that shape the human head. It notes that, “Craniofacial defects are among the most frequent human congenital abnormalities, constituting 35% of all birth defects. Those anomalies include oral clefts, which occur in approximately 1 in every 700 live births, and other craniofacial anomalies, which occur in 1 in every 1,600 newborns in the USA. An understanding of the molecular mechanisms that control craniofacial development may lead to the development of new ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat craniofacial anomalies.”

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