Dr. Julie Baker's lab examines how cells communicate and function during fetal development. The work in Dr. Baker's laboratory focuses on the establishment of specific cell fates using genomics to decipher interactions between chromatin and developmental signaling cascades, between genomes and rapidly evolving cell types, and between genomic copy number variation and gene expression. In recent years they have focused on the vastly understudied biology of the trophoblast lineage, particularly how this lineage evolved.