I use engineered tissue culture models to uncover how the mechanical properties of the microenvironment regulate fundamental cell biological processes such as 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).