Helen McNeill obtained her PhD at Stanford University with James Nelson, studying how epithelial cell polarity is established, using cultured mammalian cells. She conducted her postdoctoral studies with Mike Simon (also at Stanford), using Drosophila genetics to investigate how tissues become organized, via planar cell polarity signaling. She set up her first lab at Cancer Research UK in London England, where her lab studied Fat cadherins in flies and regulation of growth via the Hippo pathway and planar polarity. She moved her lab to the Lunenfeld Research Institute in Mount Sinai Hospital and the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada where she was Professor of Molecular Genetics, and expanded her studies to mice and hydra. In 2018, Helen moved her lab to Washington University School of Medicine, where her lab continues to study how groups of cells become organized in development. The lab uses cell biology, genetics and molecular approaches in diverse models,to understand how Fat cadherins and the Hippo pathway coordinately regulate tissue patterning and growth. Recent work in her lab has expanded to investigation of how Nemp1 regulates chromatin organization, mechanotransduction and fertility in flies, mice and humans.

Seminar Topic: Function of Nemp1 in mechanotransduction at the nuclear envelope

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