The purpose of the vascular system, pumping blood to the tissues, is fundamentally mechanical.  Cells of vessel walls thus use shear stress from blood flow and wall stress/strain from blood pressure as cues to guide embryonic morphogenesis and adult homeostasis.  I will present our latest unpublished work on the molecule mechanisms that guide these processes, a new method to apply defined forces to proteins on a biochemical scale, and how we have harnessed information from these studies to combat vascular inflammatory disease