I use engineered tissue culture models to uncover how the mechanical properties of the microenvironment regulate cell proliferation, survival, genome integrity,
and immune cell function.

Recent Work

  • Mechanical Regulation of Chromosome Loss

    In my postdoctoral research with Dennis Discher, I explored how mechanical changes in the tumor microenvironment, namely increased physical confinement of cancer cells, drive chromosome missegregation.

  • Confined Macrophage Migration

    Using a 3D hydrogel based cancer spheroid-macrophage coculture model to demonstrate how confined migration through the constricting extracellular matrix alters macrophage behavior.

  • Mechanical Regulation of Autophagy

    During my Ph.D. with Celeste Nelson, I identified for the first time that autophagy is a mechanically-regulated cell survival pathway that can be tuned to sensitize cancer cells to chemotherapy (Anlas and Nelson, Cancer Research, 2020).

    I also showed that extracellular matrix (ECM) stiffness and TGFβ-induced epithelial to mesenchymal transition synergize to promote multinucleation through cytokinesis failure (Simi, Anlas et al., Cancer Research 2018).