This type of consistency, says Azevedo, may not only impact developmental biology, but also medicine. With humans being made up of trillions of cells, cell lineage analysis has been slower to catch on when compared to the study of the large groups of cells we call organs, such as the liver and the brain. However, research into cancer and stem cells has focused our interest on the behavior of individual cells. The hope is that cell lineage analysis will become more important in the future.

An evolutionary biologist who joined the UH faculty in 2003, Azevedo received his undergraduate training at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, followed by his doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He conducted his postdoctoral research at Imperial College in London and at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

Text for this article comes from a UH press release.