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Mary Baylies is a Full Member in the Developmental Biology Program in Sloan Kettering Institute at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; she also holds a joint appointment at Cornell Medical School in the Cell and Developmental Biology Department. Using Drosophila and mammalian models, her laboratory investigates muscle specification, differentiation, homeostasis and function, both during normal development and in disease contexts.
Dr. Baylies earned her Ph.D. at Rockefeller University in 1991 in the lab of Michael Young, where she investigated molecular mechanisms underpinning circadian rhythms. She completed her postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge with Michael Bate in 1997, researching muscle development, particularly with a view to understanding the intrinsic and extrinsic programs necessary to build a muscle cell. In 1997, Dr. Baylies joined the faculty at Sloan Kettering Institute, where she investigates the molecular machinery required for the sequential steps involved in making muscle fibers.
The ultimate aim of her research is to better understand, and so contribute to the search for therapies for the treatment of muscle diseases including Rhabdomyosarcoma, Nemaline Myopathy, Centronuclear myopathies, and cancer cachexia.
The focus of her work is on how muscle cells are formed, how individual muscles achieve particular sizes and shapes, and how muscle subcellular architecture changes during differentiation, muscle function and in diseases. The work from her group has provided new insights to muscle identity through interactions between signal transduction pathways, transcription factors and chromatin regulators; muscle size through identification of mechanisms involved in muscle fusion and growth; and muscle function through study of genes and mechanisms responsible for myonuclear movement and positioning.
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