Michaela awarded the Brewer Fellowship

Congratulations to Physics PhD student Michaela Cheechov, the 2026 recipient of the Bonita and David Brewer Fellowship from UW Genome Sciences!

The Brewer Fellowship supports graduate research using model organisms. Michaela’s project brings active matter and collective behavior frameworks from biophysics to developmental self-organization in the annual killifish, in close collaboration with the Abitua lab here in Genome Sciences. Uniquely among vertebrate models, the early killifish embryo disperses into seemingly independent cells that must then re-aggregate to initiate development—a natural experiment in self-organization with no parallel in traditional model organisms. The Abitua lab has developed lightsheet live imaging to track individual cells, and Michaela is developing biophysical approaches to understand mechanisms of collective cell movement.