When plants are injured, parched, or buffeted by wind, their tissues are somehow resilient to these insults and still generate the correct form. For research excellence into how living structures recover and preserve order in morphology amid constant disruption, postdoctoral scientist Lanxi Hu has been awarded the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology’s 2025 Sam and Nancy Fleming Research Fellowship.   
 
The Fleming Fellowship is one of the Weill Institute’s most competitive honors for early-career scientists. The three-year fellowship provides salary, benefits, and research funds that allow recipients to pursue bold, high-risk ideas. 

“Lanxi’s research exemplifies the exciting, curiosity-driven science that the Fleming Fellowship was created to support,” said Brian Crane, the George W. and Grace L. Todd Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, “Her work pushes the boundaries of how we think about resilience in living systems, and she approaches every challenge with remarkable creativity and rigor. We are thrilled to see her take on questions with the potential to reshape both fundamental biology and its applications.” 

In Roeder lab, Hu is part of the team that studies morphogenesis—how organs acquire and maintain shape—and what makes these processes robust under stress. For the past decade, the Roeder lab has been working with the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, focusing on the flower’s sepals, which must grow in coordination to close around the bud. 

“It’s fascinating that the sepal’s shape and size are so reproducible despite environmental fluctuations,” Hu said. “I’m trying to understand how that robustness is achieved especially when outside forces—like physical stress caused by water loss or wounding—threaten to distort development.” 

From her perspective, the sepal is “a soft architecture—a living physical system that responds, resists and adapts.” Like a structure built to bend instead of breaking, “cells grow differently in response to local forces,” she said. “Together, these varied responses help the tissue keep its shape—it’s a kind of organization that stays strong through diversity.” 

“Lanxi is the first in my lab to examine how plant development withstands external mechanical perturbations,” said Adrienne Roeder, professor in the Section of Plant Biology in the School of Integrative Plant Science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and professor at the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology. “She’s already produced surprising results and shows the creativity and drive to take this work in bold new directions. She’s a rising star.”  

Her curiosity also extends beyond biology. Partnering with The Sabin Design Lab in Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning, and as a member of Cornell’s Engineered Living Materials Institute (ELMI), Hu helps translate biological insights into adaptive architectural and materials prototypes, many that incorporate environmental feedback.  

“We’re distilling principles from how sepals respond to external forces,” she said, “to inspire architectural forms that respond to their environment.” 

Hu traces her fascination with living systems to her first encounters with Arabidopsis, the unassuming weed that has become a cornerstone of modern biology. “It’s small but mighty,” she said. “You can study how parts become a whole greater than the sum—and still manipulate it easily enough to uncover the underlying principles.” 

Hu earned a bachelor’s degree in forestry from Nanjing Forestry University and a master’s in plant sciences from the University of Manchester.  She earned her Ph.D. in plant pathology from the University of Georgia in 2023. 

“No form arises without force, and variable cell growth is not just a default in the background but represents a system dynamics that leads to robustness” Hu said. “Biological structures—from flowers to brain cancer— must respond or adapt to stress to maintain stability or reorganize into a new stable form to survive. If we can understand how cells coordinate when they experience physical stress, we might uncover design strategies that extend far beyond biology.” 

For Hu, the Fleming Fellowship offers more than recognition. It provides freedom to connect life sciences with physical and creative disciplines. “As part of the Emergent Morphogenesis team, I am comparing my results with researchers working on somatic embryogenesis in plants, chick heart morphogenesis, and glioblastoma brain cancer in mice. Ultimately, I hope to reveal how growth and variability together create robustness—a principle that could inspire everything from crop resilience to sustainable architectural design.” She hopes her findings will be incorporated into “adaptive architectural prototypes that incorporate environmental feedback and intrinsic control, a kind of structure that possesses spatial intelligence attuned to transformation,” she said. 

The Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology is an interdisciplinary hub of research in cell and molecular biology, biomedical engineering, chemistry and chemical biology, computational biology, microbiology and plant biology. 

Henry C. Smith is the communications specialist for Biological Systems at Cornell Research and Innovation.