We don’t become scientists all at once. Most of us arrive already in motion, asking questions before we have titles, watching closely before creating the first entry on our CV. This was certainly the case for Dr. Michael Piacentino, Assistant Professor of Cell Biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
When I asked what drives his work, he paused to think and said, “I think it’s that I’m just curious.” He described how his curiosity about life and how the body works started at a young age, remembering his first lobster at a family function when, instead of eating, he patiently examined each joint and claw to see how they moved.
This general interest drew Dr. Piacentino to McGill University where, as an undergraduate student, he first became fascinated by the field of Developmental Biology. As was the case with many before him, learning about limb growth and patterning left him wanting more. “It was so satisfying to see how intersecting signals instruct a field of cells to give rise to the different parts of the limb. And learning how researchers performed the experiments that uncovered these mechanisms helped me realize I wanted a career doing the same.”
This brought him to his doctoral studies at Boston University, studying with Dr. Cynthia Bradham, where he used the developing sea urchin embryo to study skeletal patterning. While their skeleton looks very different from the vertebrate limb, it turns out there are many similarities. Migratory cells in the embryo secrete the skeleton, guided by signals from nearby tissues. These signals instruct the skeletogenic cells on where, when, and what kind of skeleton to build. Dr. Piacentino and his colleagues described new mechanisms regulating the sea urchin skeleton’s pattern across all three developmental axes. Excitingly, many of the signals used in the sea urchin are also crucial for building the vertebrate skeleton!
It’s only fitting that Dr. Piacentino then turned to the model system that first piqued his interest in research: the chicken embryo. Not only incredibly powerful to study limb development, but the chick embryo is also to thank for much of our understanding of neural crest cells. Neural crest cells are a group of migratory stem cells in the early vertebrate embryo that generate many tissues, including our peripheral nervous system and craniofacial skeleton. This became the focus of Dr. Piacentino’s postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology with Dr. Marianne Bronner.
Early in his postdoctoral work, Dr. Piacentino was walking on campus to think about projects and was hit with a spark of inspiration when he saw a fence that looked like a cell membrane. “Cells change their behavior, and we know a lot of the genes and proteins involved in this process. But what about the lipid building blocks that make up the membrane? Are they a passive scaffold for signaling across the membrane, or do they contribute more actively?”. He took this question to the literature and found a world of membrane biology and physics that said yes, lipids on a cell’s surface can indeed amplify or dampen its response to different signals. Better yet, gene expression in neural crest cells suggested that they change some of their lipid before they start their migration, and Dr. Piacentino needed to know why.
From that moment, Dr. Piacentino has been interested in connecting our understanding of what’s possible, largely drawn from biochemistry, artificial membranes, and tissue culture, with cell signaling and migration in three-dimensional embryos. He discovered that ceramide production in neural crest cells triggers endocytosis and activates migration signaling pathways. More recently, he showed that the same transcription factors defining neural crest cells selectively activate the enzyme responsible for this lipid metabolism. “This tells us that the embryo understands when and where to use specific lipids to advance its development, raising new questions about what other lipids are at work and how we can exploit their chemical properties to improve human health.”
At the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Dr. Piacentino now brings this curiosity to his own group, where his lab studies how cells move to organize the body, and what tells them where to go and when. By looking closely at events like epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and the coordinated movements of neural crest cells, they ask the key question: how do changes in lipid composition and membrane physics guide signaling and steer cell migration?
This year, the American Association for Anatomy named Dr. Piacentino the 2025 H.W. Mossman Award in Developmental Biology recipient, a recognition that marks both a milestone and a promise. Milestone, because peers see the rigor in how his lab connects lipid biochemistry and membrane physics to the choices cells make in development. Promise, because this award isn’t just a nod to what’s been done, it’s a vote for what’s to come.
If something in Dr. Michael Piacentino’s story resonates, it’s to continuously foster steady curiosity, be open to inspiration in unexpected places, and to support and uplift others. “We’re at an exciting time where identifying and characterizing lipids can be done with more sensitivity and spatial resolution, and I can’t wait to see what we learn next! But as with all research, we will face setbacks from time to time, so it is important to be compassionate, encouraging and supportive of our colleagues and students as we work together to ask these challenging but important questions.”
Be sure to follow Dr. Piacentino’s journey by checking out his lab website and social media.