Areas of Research

Introduction

Because of the extraordinary contributions of its founders and current faculty, the Department of Cell Biology at Yale is widely considered to be one of the strongest programs in the world. Created in 1973, it is regarded as the cradle of modern cell biology due to the work of its founding faculty, including the late George E. Palade, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1974 for fundamental discoveries describing the structural and functional organization of the cell. Palade was recognized for important, fundamental insights into the cell gained through synthesis of biochemical studies with detailed structural information obtained in the early development of electron microscopy for cell imaging.

Today, Cell Biology at Yale comprises a dynamic and interactive group of 34 faculty members and their research laboratories that span every major area of investigation central to the field. They are joined by nearly 111 postdoctoral fellows and 73 graduate students. Our primary facilities are located at the School of Medicine and at Yale's new West Campus. Our field is developing rapidly at areas of interface between conventional molecular cell biology of single cells and more complex cellular systems at one extreme, and at the interface with protein structure and molecular mechanism at the other.  Therefore, we operate Yale's Center for High Throughput Cell Biology which carries out genome-wide screening to establish patterns of gene function in cellular systems, and have become a center of excellence in biophysical methodologies related to molecular mechanism, such as X-ray crystallography, super-resolution optical imaging, and optical tweezers force analysis.  Cell imaging in particular is the vital core of Cell Biology.  We maintain a high level of capability in electron microscopy, including immunocytochemistry and tomography; in conventional optical microscopy at our Center for Cell & Molecular Imaging (CCMI), which performs state of the art electron microscopy and immunocytochemistry, as well as routine single and multi-photon confocal microscopy; and the CINEMA Lab, a world leader in the development of new optical techniques for live cell imaging and quantitative analysis.