Rebecca Green, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Oral and Craniofacial Sciences
University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine

Research Interests

My research focuses on understanding how genetics and environment interact to lead to craniofacial birth defects. Many of these birth defects result in mispatterning or morphology changes in cranial bones. The goal is to understand the developmental origins of these changes by understanding cell biological changes during the patterning and development of these bones. As such, my work integrates genetic and epigenetic analysis with 3D morphological analysis (microCT and microscopy based). Current projects in my lab focus on the roles on how various genetic and epigenetic mechanisms control variation in the development of the face. Techniques wise, I also use various registration and alignment protocols to understand the within group and between group variances.

Technique Expertise or Resources to share

My lab focuses on image analysis and uses a number of open source image analysis toolkits including MINC, slicermorph and deformetrica as well as custom pipelines for cell counting from 3D cellular level volumes.

We have a couple of mouse lines including A/WySn (natural partially penetrant cleft lip model) and B9d1 cilliary transition zone mutants.

Keywords

microCT, 3D microscopy, morphological analysis, shape