Harry McNamara
Harry McNamara is an Assistant Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and of Physics, and a member of the Wu Tsai Institute. Harry received his undergraduate degree from Yale (BR ‘11) with majors in Physics and in Ethics, Politics, and Economics. He received his PhD in Physics in 2019 from Harvard, where he worked with Adam Cohen to demonstrate new kinds of electrophysiological pattern formation in synthetic tissues. Before coming to Yale, Harry was an independent Lewis-Sigler Scholar at Princeton, where he worked closely with Jared Toettcher to decode symmetry breaking and self-organization in stem cell organoids.
We use stem cell models of embryonic development (organoids and embryoids) as physics laboratories to understand fundamental principles of multicellular self-organization and pattern formation. By programming stem cells with genetic circuits that measure or control biological signals, we decode how signaling networks encode instructions for building tissues, organs, and organisms. Our long-term goal for synthetic developmental biology is to build a quantitative understanding of multicellular self-organization, and to enable the rational control of biological pattern formation.
- McNamara HM, Jia BZ, Guyer A, Parot VJ, Dobbs C, Schier AF, Cohen AE, and Lord ND. Optogenetic control of Nodal signaling patterns. Development 152.9 (2025): dev204506.
- McNamara HM, Solley SC, Adamson B, Chan MM, and Toettcher JE. Recording morphogen signals reveals mechanisms underlying gastruloid symmetry breaking.” Nature Cell Biology (2024): 1-13.
- McNamara HM, Salegame R, Tanoury ZA, Xu H, Begum S, Ortiz G, Pourquie O, and Cohen AE. Bioelectrical domain walls in homogeneous tissues. Nature Physics 16 (2020): 357–364.
- McNamara HM, Dodson S, Huang YL, Miller EW, Sandstede B, and Cohen AE. Geometry-Dependent Arrhythmias in Electrically Excitable Tissues. Cell Systems 7 (2018): 359-370
- McNamara HM, Zhang H, Werley CA, and Cohen AE. Optically Controlled Oscillators in an Engineered Bioelectric Tissue. Phys. Rev. X 6, 031001 (2016).