Jody Rosenblatt

Jody Rosenblatt is an American biologist who is a professor of Cell Biology at King's College London. Her research investigates how epithelial sheets maintain cell number homeostasis. She discovered cell extrusion, a process that removes unwanted cells whilst maintaining epithelial integrity.

Early life and education Rosenblatt is from Utah, United States. She was an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. She took nine months out of school and moved to Ireland, where she worked on a goat farm. Before deciding to pursue a PhD, she joined David O. Morgan's laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, where she discovered CDK2, a homologue of Cyclin-dependent kinase 1 and helped resolve its crystal structure. She has said that at the time new things were being discovered once a week, which made the field very exciting.

Research and career Rosenblatt started her research group at the University of Utah, where she was appointed the H. A. and Edna Benning Endowed Chair. She looked to understand the mechanisms that guide extrusion and its implications in biological processes.

Rosenblatt investigates how epithelial cells maintain a balance through cell death and division. She discovered that these processes are regulated by mechanical forces: overcrowding of cells causes some to become extruded and subsequently die, when they are too sparse, they stretch and divide. Both processes rely on PIEZO1, a stretch-activated calcium channel. Proper extrusion is crucial for controlling epithelial cell numbers. Dysregulation in this process can lead to aggressive metastatic cancers and asthma. From their identification that the pathological crowding of an asthma attack can cause so much extrusion that it destroys the airway epithelial lining, causing the ensuing inflammation and hypersusceptibility to infection that can cause more attacks, they are investigating a new way to prevent asthma attacks altogether.

Selected publications