• BIO 101. Fundamentals of Biology
• BIOL 332. Physiology/Anatomy of the Human Lab II

• Ph.D., Developmental Biology, Kansas State University, 2023
• B.S., Biology, University of Alabama in Huntsville, 2017

• Postdoctoral Associate, Duke University, 2023
• Graduate Teaching Assistant, Kansas State University, 2017-2023

Publications

• Messer, C. L. and McDonald, J. A. (2023). Rap1 promotes epithelial integrity and cell viability in a growing tissue. Developmental Biology 501, 1–19.
• Messer, C. L. and McDonald, J. A. (2023). Expect the unexpected: conventional and unconventional roles for cadherins in collective cell migration. Biochemical Society Transactions BST20221202.
• Y. Chen, N. Kotian, G. Aranjuez, L. Chen, C.L. Messer, A. Burtscher, K. Sawant, D. Ramel, X. Wang, and J.A. McDonald. 2020 Protein Phosphatase 1 activity controls a balance between collective and single cell modes of migration. Pre-print bioRxiv (October 20, 2019: https://doi.org/10.1101/811562). eLife. 2020 May 5;9: e52979. doi: 10.7554/eLife.52979. PMID: 32369438.
• E.C. Partridge, S. Chhetri, J. Prokop, R. Ramaker, C. Jansen, S. Goh, M. Mackiewicz, K. Newberry, L. Brandsmeier, S. Meadows, C.L. Messer, A. Hardigan, C. Coppola, E. Dean, S. Jiang, D. Savic, A. Mortazavi, B. Wold, R. Myers, E. Mendenhall. Occupancy maps of 208 chromatin-associated proteins in one human cell type. Nature 2020 Jul;583(7818):720-728. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2023-4. PMCID: PMC7398277.

Awards

• Michael Scott Watkins Teaching Award (2022)

Engagement in the classroom is step one. Students that are actively engaged are more likely to retain information and perform better on assessments. I use classroom performance as an indicator of successful engagement and alter content delivery accordingly to meet the needs of my students more thoroughly.

My research program seeks to understand how organ and tissue physiology drives tissue development from single cell behaviors to larger morphogenetic movements. I’m interested in understanding the developmental trajectories that allow individual cells to function in concert within the context of a tissue or organ that then serves a larger role within the organism. My lab uses the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a multi-tissue model to investigate basic cell biological questions that contribute to successful tissue and organ function.