Biophysical Society Bulletin | November 2020

Biophysicist in Profile

Emily M. Mace Areas of Research Lymphocyte migration, innate immune cell differentiation

Institution Columbia University

At-a-Glance

Emily M. Mace , Assistant Professor of Pediatric Immunology at Columbia University, got started in science unintentionally, after she was inspired by a PhD scientist who taught her college cell biology course. Now, years later, she says she considers herself an aspirational biophysicist, “but I am highly motivated to understand how forces and the physical environment influence single-cell behavior, and throughout my training I have been drawn to cross-disciplinary approaches that span cell biology, immunology, and biophysics. I was fortunate to be able to explore that as a postdoc and have established this as a deliberate trajectory now that I have my own research group.”

Emily M. Mace

Emily M. Mace never pictured herself working as a scientific researcher. She does not remember quite what she did see herself doing when she was a child growing up in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, but she says, “I know running a research lab wasn’t in the picture! I remember reading a book about the astronomers who work on the Hale Telescope at Palomar Mountain when I was a teenager, and I do credit that as inspiration for some of my love of sitting in a dark room for long periods of time, with microscopes in my case.” She left high school before graduating, but eventually re- turned to community college with the goal of finishing up her high school requirements and pursuing a nursing degree. “I realized pretty quickly that nursing wasn’t going to be for me, but I took a cell biology course taught by a PhD scientist who described her experiences in research,” Mace says. “I was hooked by both the fascination of understanding how cells and systems worked, and by her description of the excite- ment of bench science.” She completed her undergraduate degree in microbiology and immunology from the University of Saskatchewan in 2003 and then moved to the University of British Columbia to pur- sue her PhD in genetics. She worked in Fumio Takei ’s lab in the Terry Fox Laboratory - BC Cancer Research Centre. From 2010 to 2016, Mace did postdoctoral work with Jordan Orange , first at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and then at Baylor College of Medicine. “I started my postdoc at the time that several exciting papers came out on asymmetric division of T cells being influenced by cell-cell contacts, and I started thinking about whether this process might be relevant for innate cells,” she shares. “I was also very interested in cell migration and development and decided to focus on trying to define how natural killer cells (an innate immune cell) interact with stromal cells and the extracellular matrix as they under- go differentiation.” She had joined Orange’s lab with the goal

of learning quantitative imaging and light microscopy, so she had the opportunity there to do high-resolution and superres- olution imaging, as well as develop live cell imaging tech- niques to measure and define complex modes of migration of NK cells on stroma. “I was fortunate to be at the University of Pennsylvania at the beginning of my postdoc, so I had the opportunity to participate in the Motor Club there with Erika Holzbaur , Michael Ostap , and others, and that and other expe- riences there really broadened my thinking. I was also lucky to have had a wonderfully supportive postdoc mentor and the opportunity to pursue many projects and ideas, so there were a lot of chances to learn and explore, especially in the fields of light microscopy and cell biology.” Following her postdoc, she was an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine from 2016 to 2018. Mace is now an Assistant Professor of Pediatric Immunology at Columbia University. Her lab focuses on innate immune cell migration and differentiation. “We have three main lines of investigation in the lab. One is focused on cell migration and interactions between immune cells and complex microenvironments (tis- sue) and how those interactions affect NK cell differentiation. We are interested in how cell migratory properties are both acquired as cells develop and influenced by their immediate environments. Traditionally much of this work has been in two-dimensional, fairly artificial models, but we are trying to extend this into physiologically relevant 3D human tissue models. We also investigate the cytoskeletal regulation of NK cell migration and how integrins and other adhesion mole- cules participate in this process. Finally, we have a project on the role that cell cycle and proliferation play in NK cell differ- entiation.” Her big picture goal is to better understand how signaling and physical properties in the microenvironment influence human innate lymphocyte development and homeostasis. Mace shares, “Ultimately, I see each of the projects described

November 2020

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