Dr Hanna Maria Häkkinen

Hanna-Maria is one of our College Research Associates, based at the Department of Physiology at the University of Cambridge as a Postdoctoral Fellow.

BIOGRAPHY

I am a Herchel Smith Postdoctoral Fellow interested in dynamic cell behaviours during embryo development using in vivo live imaging approaches. I was trained as biologist in University of Jyväskylä, Finland. I carried out my PhD in Dr. Verena Ruprecht’s lab in Barcelona in Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), where I focused on mechanoregulation of phagocytic clearance by epithelial cells during early embryo development. After my PhD, I joined Dr. Elena Scarpa’s lab at PDN in Cambridge University to investigate the mechanical regulation of the neural crest migration. Neural crest has an extraordinary migratory capacity and it gives rise to many cell derivatives including neurons, pigment cells, cardiomyocytes and skeletogenic cells. Although neural crest is conserved between vertebrates, the migration mode of this cell population varies largely between species as well as within an embryo depending on the location at the anterior posterior body axis. By combining live imaging, genetic tools and mechanical perturbations of the surrounding tissues, I am interested in understanding, how the mechanical signals from the physiological tissue environment regulates neural crest migration and secures robustness in embryo development.