About

Meghan Driscoll is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Minnesota. She is a graduate faculty member of the Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics (MPaT) Graduate Program, as well as the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Graduate Program. Dr. Driscoll attended Harvey Mudd College, where she received a B.S. in Physics, and earned a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Maryland under the mentorship of Dr. Wolfgang Losert. She further developed her research expertise at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where she joined the lab of Dr. Gaudenz Danuser as a Postdoctoral Fellow and later served as an Instructor. She joined the Department of Pharmacology in 2022. Her research focuses on how cell morphology, dynamics, and signaling govern cell function, particularly in cancer and immune cells that are highly dynamic. Her lab investigates these processes using state-of-the-art microscopy techniques, especially high-resolution light-sheet microscopy, to visualize subcellular dynamics. The detailed 3D movies produced require dedicated computational pipelines, and her team develops algorithms rooted in computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning to facilitate biological discovery.

Research topics

• Biology
• Cell biology
• Cancer research
• Chemistry
• Biophysics
• Biochemistry
• Genetics
• Neuroscience

Selected publications

• Enhanced analytic methodology enables postmortem diagnosis of hereditary AApoAI amyloidosis

  Amyloid · 2025-06-12

  article

  Enhanced analytic methodology enables postmortem diagnosis of hereditary AApoAI amyloidosis

  PublisherDOI

• Direct Arp2/3-vinculin binding is required for pseudopod extension, but only on compliant substrates and in 3D

  iScience · 2025-05-09 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  nascent adhesions, supported by Arp2/3-vinculin interactions, is essential to form mechanically stable links between fibrous extracellular matrix and actin in 3D. This highlights how experiments on stiff, planar substrates may conceal actin architectural features that are essential for morphogenesis in 3D.

  PublisherDOI

• Intravascular lobular capillary hemangioma of the temporal artery arising in an older adult: a case report

  American Journal of Ophthalmology Case Reports · 2025-04-15

  articleOpen access

  To describe a case of an intravascular lobular capillary hemangioma arising in the temporal artery of an older patient. Lobular capillary hemangiomas (LCHs) are common benign vascular tumors previously described in literature as arising in the skin and mucous membranes of children and young adults. They have very rarely been characterized as arising from the temporal artery or being present in older adults. This report details the case of a 60-year-old man with reported history of intermittent blurry vision and jaw pain, headaches, and fatigue with bilateral shoulder and neck pain. He subsequently developed a palpable, tender left temple mass over the course of three weeks. Ultrasound of the left forehead over the lesion identified focal outpouching of a blood vessel with a thickened wall and arterial flow. Biopsy of the lesion, initially intended to rule out vasculitis, demonstrated numerous capillaries amidst a fibromyxoid stroma with immunohistochemical staining confirming it as an LCH. The first reported case of an intravascular lobular capillary hemangioma (IVLCH) of the temporal artery involved a 27-year-old man in 1994; this was, followed by a second report of a 47-year-old man in 2022, both of which were confirmed via biopsy. 1 2 This is a reported case of a temporal artery IVLCH in an older patient. This contributes to limited literature characterizing unusual IVLCH variants, and while rare, can be considered in the differential for temporal artery pathology and superficial temporal masses.

  PublisherDOI

• Proteolysis-free amoeboid migration of melanoma cells through crowded environments via bleb-driven worrying

  Developmental Cell · 2024-06-12 · 30 citations

  articleOpen access1st author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Novel Analytic Methodology Enables Postmortem Diagnosis of Hereditary ApoAI Amyloidosis PC16 (#239)

  2024-05-10

  preprint
  PublisherDOI

• Surface-guided computing to analyze subcellular morphology and membrane-associated signals in 3D

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2023-04-12 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Signal transduction and cell function are governed by the spatiotemporal organization of membrane-associated molecules. Despite significant advances in visualizing molecular distributions by 3D light microscopy, cell biologists still have limited quantitative understanding of the processes implicated in the regulation of molecular signals at the whole cell scale. In particular, complex and transient cell surface morphologies challenge the complete sampling of cell geometry, membrane-associated molecular concentration and activity and the computing of meaningful parameters such as the cofluctuation between morphology and signals. Here, we introduce u-Unwrap3D, a framework to remap arbitrarily complex 3D cell surfaces and membrane-associated signals into equivalent lower dimensional representations. The mappings are bidirectional, allowing the application of image processing operations in the data representation best suited for the task and to subsequently present the results in any of the other representations, including the original 3D cell surface. Leveraging this surface-guided computing paradigm, we track segmented surface motifs in 2D to quantify the recruitment of Septin polymers by blebbing events; we quantify actin enrichment in peripheral ruffles; and we measure the speed of ruffle movement along topographically complex cell surfaces. Thus, u-Unwrap3D provides access to spatiotemporal analyses of cell biological parameters on unconstrained 3D surface geometries and signals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Data repository supporting "Cellular Harmonics for the Morphology-invariant Analysis of Molecular Organization at the Cell Surface".

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-07-20 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  This repository contains a collection of 3D cell images taken via high resolution light sheet microscopy. The images have been analyzed by the uSignal3D package, which can be found at the GitHub repository (https://github.com/DanuserLab/u-signal3D/tree/uSignal3Dpaper). The analysis was conducted in conjunction with the paper titled “Cellular Harmonics for the Morphology-invariant Analysis of Molecular Organization at the Cell Surface”. The paper is accepted, in principle, for publication in Nature Computational Science. A preprint of the manuscript is available on BioRxiv at https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.08.17.504332. This paper provides a detailed description of the materials and methods associated with the cell image data. Within the repository, the data is structured according to the figure numbers and extended data figures in the publication.

  PublisherDOI

• Surface-guided computing to quantify dynamic interactions between cell morphology and molecular signals in 3D

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2023-04-14 · 12 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Signal transduction and cell function are governed by the spatiotemporal organization of membrane-associated molecules. Despite significant advances in visualizing molecular distributions by 3D light microscopy, cell biologists still have limited quantitative understanding of the processes implicated in the regulation of molecular signals at the whole cell scale. In particular, complex and transient cell surface morphologies challenge the complete sampling of cell geometry, membrane-associated molecular concentration and activity and the computing of meaningful parameters such as the cofluctuation between morphology and signals. Here, we introduce u-Unwrap3D, a framework to remap arbitrarily complex 3D cell surfaces and membrane-associated signals into equivalent lower dimensional representations. The mappings are bidirectional, allowing the application of image processing operations in the data representation best suited for the task and to subsequently present the results in any of the other representations, including the original 3D cell surface. Leveraging this surface-guided computing paradigm, we track segmented surface motifs in 2D to quantify the recruitment of Septin polymers by blebbing events; we quantify actin enrichment in peripheral ruffles; and we measure the speed of ruffle movement along topographically complex cell surfaces. Thus, u-Unwrap3D provides access to spatiotemporal analyses of cell biological parameters on unconstrained 3D surface geometries and signals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Blebs promote cell survival by assembling oncogenic signalling hubs

  Nature · 2023 · 148 citations

  • Cell biology
  • Biology
  • Cancer research
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cellular harmonics for the morphology-invariant analysis of molecular organization at the cell surface

  Nature Computational Science · 2023-09-14 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant F32GM116370

  NIH · $118k · 2017

• Formation and function of lamellipodial morphology in 3D microenvironments

  NIH · $180k · 2018–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Gaudenz Danuser

  Southwestern Medical Center

  43 shared

• Reto Fiolka

  The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

  36 shared

• Kevin M. Dean

  The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

  32 shared

• Wolfgang Losert

  University of Maryland, College Park

  31 shared

• Erik S. Welf

  The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

  31 shared

• Andrew Weems

  The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

  21 shared

• Alexis J. Lomakin

  Medical University of Vienna

  17 shared

• Bo-Jui Chang

  Southwestern Medical Center

  16 shared

Education

• PhD, Physics

  University of Maryland, College Park

  2013

• B.S., Physics

  Harvey Mudd College

  2006