Dr. Cecilia Moens elected inaugural member of the Society for Developmental Biology Academy

Revealing how the early brain develops

Moens’ selection recognizes her years of service to the society and her many contributions to our understanding of developmental biology. Moens, a researcher in Fred Hutch’s Basic Sciences Division, uses zebrafish as a model to study the genes that control the brain’s early development.

“The brain receives sensory information from the environment and from inside the body and generates appropriate motor and visceral behaviors in response,” she said. “We’re working to discover how the neural circuits that govern these responses are built and refined during embryo development, insights that will shed light on how the brain works at its most fundamental level.”

Moens has made abundant breakthroughs in our understanding of how the brain is patterned early in development, and how cells with different identities sort out from one another to establish brain boundaries. Moens’s current research focuses on how immature neurons make their connections to muscles and other neurons in the process of building functional circuits. Her lab has discovered how a vitamin A derivative orchestrates how the vagus nerve connects accurately to its many different targets, and how it re-connects to those targets after nerve damage.

The implications for Moens’s work extend beyond the brain. The processes that underlie brain development are shared with other developing organs and, when unintentionally awakened in mature tissues, can promote cancer. Understanding these processes can shed light on what goes awry in cancer as well as developmental disorders such as spina bifida, a birth defect in which the spinal cord does not properly form.