Current Title, Department, Employer:
Professor, Department of Developmental and Cell Biology, University of California, Irvine
Brief Bio:
Dr. Schilling is a Professor at the University of California, Irvine. He completed his PhD in 1993 at the University of Oregon and his postdoctoral training in 1999 as a Welcome Trust Career Development Fellow at University College London in the United Kingdom. Dr. Schilling’s current research examines how tendon cells diversify and differentiate during embryonic development as well as how they sense mechanical forces and respond in terms of their production of extracellular matrix, in work supported by the National Institutes of Health. His contributions to the field of developmental biology have been recognized by being awarded a Pew Scholarship in the Biomedical Sciences and becoming a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Schilling is also committed to promoting research and education in developmental and cell biology. To that end, he has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Developmental Biology, chair of the Department of Developmental and Cell Biology at UC Irvine, and he is currently co-director of the Zebrafish Development and Genetics Course at the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, MA.
Who have been your mentors?
I have had many great mentors over my scientific career. My advisor when I started as a PhD student at U Michigan, Glenn Northcutt, helped guide my interests in neuroscience and evolution, with a particular interest in teleost fish, since they show such a huge diversity in body plans and behaviors. My PhD advisor at U Oregon, Charles Kimmel, helped me establish interests in embryonic development and a strong reputation in Zebrafish research during its very earliest days as a model system. My postdoctoral advisor in London, Phil Ingham, helped me expand my reputation as a pioneer in Zebrafish research and to make connections with the European developmental biology community. My postdoctoral work with Christianne Nusslein-Volhard in Tubingen, Germany, gave me new opportunities to continue my research on Zebrafish models for craniofacial and musculoskeletal development. I am also very grateful to Nigel Holder and Steve Wilson, who sponsored me as a new Welcome Career Development Fellow when I was just starting my lab as a new investigator in the United Kingdom before moving to UC Irvine.
What are your specific research areas and expertise?
Our lab uses developmental genetic approaches in Zebrafish to focus on two main areas of research: 1) cranial neural crest specification and formation of the craniofacial skeleton, and 2) cell-matrix interactions and roles for mechanical force in tendon and ligament development. With over 35 years of experience working with Zebrafish, we focus a lot on imaging of fluorescent transgenics in which we can track, or perform single cell sequencing on, every cell in an embryo or take advantage of the extensive library of mutants and transgenics for asking questions about gene functions in musculoskeletal development. A lot of our recent work on tendons has utilized a transgenic line of Zebrafish expressing mCherry under the control of the scleraxis (scx) enhancer/promoter, which labels every tendon/ligament in the living embryo.
What are you currently working on?
We currently have three main projects. The first is to use single cell approaches, such as single cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) to characterize transcriptional heterogeneity in cranial neural crest (NC) cells as they migrate in embryos and how these progenitor cells acquire their diverse fates, including connective tissues such as tendons and ligaments. The second is to characterize Zebrafish mutants that disrupt cranial NC development as models for human birth defects, such as cleft palate. Finally, we have a project using scRNA-seq to investigate transcriptional heterogeneity in embryonic tenocytes and ligamentocytes, including how their transcriptional signatures and matrix production respond to changes in mechanical forces of muscle contraction.
What has been the biggest challenge for you in your research?
Having mentored many students, postdocs, and faculty over my career, I have found personnel management to be the biggest challenge, despite being the most rewarding in many ways. Balancing the different capabilities and interests of people in my lab with their career goals as well as my own for research projects, publications and grant funding is no small feat at the best of times. Doing it in the context of the pandemic and associated difficulties in recruiting new researchers has been even more challenging.
What project(s) are you looking forward to in the near future?
I am excited to explore new research areas in gene regulation in skeletal and tendon cells, particularly the identification of tenocyte-specific and craniofacial enhancers. I also look forward to expanding my research toward looking at a variety of fish species to explore questions more focused on evolution of the musculoskeletal system. Toward this end, my lab has spent the last 5 years or so developing a quantitative locus (QTL) mapping study of craniofacial traits in two closely related species of African cichlids from Lake Malawi.
What do you want to do next in your career?
Having recently completed a term as department chair, I am looking forward to getting back into the lab and becoming more involved with my lab’s research projects. I am also involved in our systems biology centers on campus and building collaborative research groups that bring together experimental researchers with computational biologists. I am keen on outreach efforts to promote science to underrepresented minorities in our local Hispanic communities in southern California. To this end, our UCI Zebrafish group has joined an outreach program called BioEyes that brings simple experiments with Zebrafish to local schools and is the first to do so to largely Spanish speaking students.
What advice would you give young investigators in the field?
I would advise junior investigators to be opportunists. In this day and age, it is as important to follow your nose when you think of research projects that might be novel or fundable, as it is to be focused in your research. I would also advise them to try and be more collaborative, for example searching for colleagues who might help them move their studies into more computational modeling directions with which they have very little experience. This has really helped broaden my perspectives as well as improving my success in obtaining funding by introducing technical novelty to ongoing projects.
When you’re not in the lab, what do you like to do for fun?
I enjoy biking (both on and off road), mountaineering, skiing, and sailboat racing, which fortunately we have many opportunities to do near UCI. I also enjoy both playing guitar, though I am still very much an amateur, and attending live music concerts.
What resources would you like to see available from the ORS Tendon Section?
I would like to see more resources put toward basic research projects, particularly in tendon developmental biology and non-human systems. These have lots to offer in terms of basic tendon and ligament cell biology and genetics and are represented by a vanishingly small group of researchers in this section who work with animal models.
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