A Place to Hang My Hat (both literal and figurative)

I finally have a place to hang my hat! Well, actually we've had this coat/hat stand in the corner of my office for a couple of weeks now, and it's been so nice to have it! I can hang my coat up and my hat & scarf, instead of always putting the coat and scarf on the back of my chair and my hat on my desk or bookshelf. I still put my backpack on the bookshelf, but...


And I think I have finally found a place to hang my hat - figuratively speaking - with regard to my research as a post-doc. I've been struggling for a long time to find/define a project that made sense to me, where I could see what the big picture was, and where I could see some semblance of a connection to speech production. And the hat-rack/theme is: Fibrosis! I'm reading a bunch of papers on pulmonary fibrosis, and it's fascinating stuff. The reason this is particularly fascinating is because I've figured out that I can relate pulmonary fibrosis to vocal fold scarring/fibrosis. Pulmonary fibrosis has been studied a lot, but vocal fold fibrosis mechanisms at the cellular and molecular level have hardly been touched! So there's plenty of work to be done. But there's just enough known that I can read the pulmonary literature and be thinking of specific questions to ask about vocal folds - do they fibrose in similar ways to the lung? Are there similar mechanisms involved? So I can define a large set of experiments to study the mechanisms of vocal fold fibrosis, which is nice because it relates in some very clear ways to speech production - but in doing so I will also be able to relate vocal fold fibrosis to pulmonary fibrosis, which will keep me grounded in the world of respiratory physiology. This is very nice since I am in a respiratory physiology group, and I've been trying to come up with some way to relate my interest in vocal folds to the lung. Another nice thing about this project is that it involves a lot of molecular biology, and the biophysics have not really been touched upon, even in pulmonary fibrosis. So there is definitely room to relate fibrosis to biophysics. Furthermore, studying the biophysical properties of vocal fold epithelial cells and their contribution to vocal fold fibrosis will be useful for pulmonary fibrosis since it is difficult to study the biophysics of alveolar epithelial cells because they are ciliated (I think - maybe that's just bronchial/tracheal epithelial cells?).

Some example questions: Is there evidence of pro-apoptotic signaling in the epithelium of fibrotic vocal folds? Does the stiffness of the ECM affect the migratory and mitotic capabilities of epithelial cells? Do epithelial cells in fibrotic vocal folds have different stiffnesses than in normal vocal folds, and do these different stiffnesses translate to different stresses propagated through the ECM to the fibroblasts and myofibroblasts? How do different stresses on fibroblasts and myofibroblasts affect their function, the laying down of ECM, and the signals they send back to the epithelial cells wrt mitosis, migration, and other functions?

On the side, I have these questions: How do the mechanical properties of the ECM affect the generation of the mucosal wave? Is the stiffness and elasticity of the elastin and collagen in the longitudinal direction really relevant to this, or could it be the density of ECM fibers along the superficial-deep tissue axis, or the stiffness and elasticity of the anchor proteins that bind the epithelium to the ECM or other proteins running along the same (superficial-deep) axis?