Multicellular patterns and structures emerge as cells execute instructions received from cues in their microenvironment. Deciphering how cells integrate these cues to achieve an organized, functional structure is a fundamental question in biology with important biomedical implications in areas such as tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. An essential element in multicellular assembly involves direct cell-cell interactions. Cell-cell contacts are not only physical links between neighboring cells, but also sources of biochemical signals that instruct cellular behavior. Our lab is investigating how direct cell-cell interactions crosstalk with other environmental cues to affect individual cell fate choices, and thereby, generate multicellular patterns. In this talk, I will describe recent results that reveal a coupling between epidermal growth factor (EGF) and cell-cell contact in regulating the proliferation of human epithelial cells. This coupling between a long-range signal (EGF) and short-range cell-cell interactions gives rise to transient spatial heterogeneity in cell cycle activity. Single-cell measurements show that specific signaling pathways are influenced by cell-cell contact only when EGF concentration is below a critical concentration. These results reveal that quantitative competition between EGF and contact signaling pathways gives rise to spatiotemporal dynamics of epithelial cell proliferation.