Gerecht Lab

Snow days at Duke! 🧪☃️❄️ #academicsky

Our January Journal Club! We discussed the role of cystine in vascular growth and repair 🧪🫀 #scisky

www.cell.com/cell-metabol...

Mechano-Senenscence

Notch as a mechanosensor for Matrix Stiffness in Endothelial Cell in 3D Col-MA/HA-MA Hydrogel
Light-inducible crosslinking/stiffening

Stiffness-induced SASP in 3D EC distinct from canonical pro-inflamm SASP

@gerechtlab.bsky.social bioRxiv 2025
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

As we enter 2026, we are reflecting back on the past year and all we have achieved! It was a year filled with challenges but also immense growth and accomplishment by our trainees. Here's to a productive and fulfilling 2026 🥂🎉🧪 #scisky #academicsky

Huge congratulations to postdoc Yaqing Huang who was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Heart Association! She will be studying persistent endothelial cell activation during fibrosis. We are so proud! 🫀🧪 #scisky #academicsky

Happy Holidays from the Gerecht Lab! Wishing everyone a safe and relaxing end of the year #academicsky #scisky 🧪☃️

Congrats to postdoc Jenn for winning 1st place poster in Bladder Physiology at her first CAIRIBU conference! 🧪 #scisky #academicsky

Happy Fall from the Gerecht Lab! 🍁🧪 #academicsky #scisky

Happy Halloween!! The Gerecht Lab’s Louvre Heist Crew stole the show at this years’ BME Department Halloween party 🦺💎

Our very first Gerecht Lab Bakeoff was a huge success!! 🧁Congratulations to winner Makenzie who made delicious rice krispies! We had a fantastic variety of entries with lots of creativity on show. #academicsky

A full house for our October journal club! We discussed an organotypic atlas of human vascular cells 🧪🔬🫀

#scisky #academicsky

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congratulations to PhD Candidate Parker Esswein for winning First Place Poster Award at the Bioengineered Tissue Systems & Models Meeting at Cold Spring Harbor! We are so proud 👏🧪 #scisky #academicsky

We are having a great time at the Bioengineered Tissue Systems & Models Meeting at Cold Spring Harbor! PhD candidate Emily Warren presented her work on endothelial cell and pericyte crosstalk. 🧪🔬 #scisky #academicsky

🚨New Gerecht Lab Pub!🚨

Check out our latest work where we demonstrate that direct endothelial cell-pericyte contact in the retina downregulates VEGFR2 in endothelial cells, promoting barrier function 🧪 #angiogenesis #retina #scisky

iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx...

Congratulations to our newest PhD Candidate, Marcos Negrete, who passed his prelim last week! He has made some incredible progress in his work on vascularized prostate cancer organoids 🧪🔬 #scisky #academicsky

Our September Journal Club! We discussed small-diameter artery grafts engineered from pluripotent stem cells #scisky #academicsky 🧪🔬🫀 www.cell.com/cell-reports...

We are welcoming two new undergraduate researchers this fall! Welcome to Carmen and Fernando 🧪🎉🔬 We are excited to see what they accomplish! #scisky #academicsky

Our August Journal Club! ☀️ We discussed functional roles for senescent cells across the body #scisky #academicsky 🧪🔬

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Congratulations to our postdoc, Jenn, who received the Duke KURe Fellowship in benign urology! #scisky 🧪🔬🎉 We are very excited to see her new project develop!

Congratulations to our postdoc Yaqing who was selected as a Duke Scholar in Molecular Medicine! This nine month training program will give her hands-on experiences and shadowing in the clinic. We're so excited to hear about what she learns and how she'll apply it to her research! 🎉🧪🔬🫀 #scisky

Additionally, our PhD student Marcos won the Outstanding Mentor Award! We are so proud of him and his dedication to mentorship!

High school student Will spent the summer with us, working with PhD student Marcos to make prostate cancer organoids, through the DukeREP Program! He won 3rd place at the final poster symposium. We are so proud of how much he learned so quickly! 🧪🔬 #scisky #academicsky

We are also so proud of our undergraduate, Dimitrios Owen, who has spent the summer in an REU at Wake Forest, and presented his work there at the NIDDK R25 Symposium! We're excited to have him back in the fall semester & looking forward to hearing about his summer! 🧪🔬 #scisky #academicsky

We have had an incredible time at the Biomechanics in Vascular Biology & Disease GRC! Congrats to PhD candidate Emily Warren and postdoc Jiyeon Song for outstanding poster awards! We are so proud! 🧪🫀🔬 #scisky #academicsky

Our July Journal Club! We discussed the contribution of perivascular cells to mediating mechanical and structural changes in capillaries 🧪🫀 #academicsky #scisky www.science.org/doi/full/10....

We're celebrating our newest PhD Candidate, Katherine Tang, who passed her preliminary exam last week! She has done some fantastic work with engineered arterial grafts to study atherosclerosis! 🧪🫀🔬 #scisky #academicsky

A big congratulations to Parker Esswein, who passed his preliminary exam and became a PhD Candidate in May! He's made incredible progress on engineering the inner blood-retinal barrier and we are so excited for him 🧪🧑‍🚀 #scisky #academicsky

We are enjoying some beautiful weather here at Duke! We have a lot of exciting research to share in the coming months, so keep your eyes peeled 👀 Here's to a summer of progress & fun! ☀️ #academicsky

Postdoc @jennhammel.bsky.social representing the lab today at the 2025 North Carolina Postdoc Symposium at the NC Biotechnology Center. We have an incredible community of scientists here in NC! #scisky #academicsky 🧪🔬

Give him a follow @juliannicenboim.bsky.social to stay up to date!