Scientific Background

I currently hold an NIH Pathway to Independence Award (R00) as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cell and Tissue Biology at UCSF, where my lab is working to understand the post-transcriptional control mechanisms that underlie underlie cell state transitions using vertebrate neural crest as a model.

I recently completed a postdoc in the lab of Dr. Marianne Bronner at Caltech, where I focused on the regulation of the neural crest epithelial—mesenchymal transition (EMT). I uncovered a new molecular mechanism whereby transient expression of a canonical Wnt signaling antagonist, Draxin, controls cranial neural crest EMT through intermediate attenuation of canonical Wnt signaling (Hutchins and Bronner, 2018); since its publication, our paper has been selected by the journal for featuring in two special issues (1; 2), and our follow-up paper was also featured on the cover of Developmental Biology (Hutchins and Bronner, 2019).

My recent works (Hutchins et al., 2022; Hutchins et al., 2020) provide novel, foundational evidence for the importance of post-transcriptional regulation and RNA granules in the control of neural crest development. The vision of my future independent research program is to parse how post-transcriptional regulation intersects with gene regulatory networks to control developmental pluripotency and cell fate decisions in vivo, providing new scientific avenues for translational applications to treat congenital malformations and cancers resulting from neural crest defects.

From my graduate research experiences in post-transcriptional regulation, and my postdoctoral research using live RNA imaging in combination with classical embryology techniques, I am uniquely well suited to tackle the study of post-transcriptional regulation in neural crest biology. As a graduate student in the lab of Dr. Ben Szaro at the University at Albany, I asked how post-transcriptional regulation and signaling pathways intersected to direct an important developmental process—axon outgrowth—in an intact, organismal context. My graduate research generated novel and critical insights into the regulation of the RNA-binding protein, hnRNP K, and afforded me in-depth knowledge of post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms at the cellular and molecular level (Hutchins and Szaro, 2013; Hutchins et al., 2015; Hutchins et al., 2016).