Kerry Tucker

Education

Brief Biography

I come from the North Shore of Massachusetts, and I studied biochemistry at Harvard College, starting my research career purifying clathrin proteins from sheep brain at Harvard Medical School. I continued my studies as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, MA where I studied the role of DNA methylation in the development of the mouse, working in the lab of Rudolf Jaenisch. I then switched to developmental neuroscience as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Yves-Alain Barde at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Munich, Germany, and subsequently as a group leader at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, from 2003 until 2013. In this time, I developed tools to visualize with fluorescent proteins the embryonic development of the central nervous system (CNS), using genetically-altered mice as a model. My laboratory has discovered that primary cilia, a special microtubule-based organelle found in every cell, control early events in CNS development, including morphogenesis, boundary formation, neurogenesis, and nerve outgrowth. With a career based in Germany, I developed many international collaborations exploring the role of primary cilia in the development of a variety of CNS structures, including the forebrain, midbrain, and spinal cord. After my return to the USA as an Associate Professor at the University of New England, I am now moving into the analysis of postnatal phenotypes associated with loss of primary cilia in specific neuronal populations. We hope thereby to model some of the cognitive / neurodevelopmental defects seen in subsets of patients with so-called ciliopathies, multispectrum diseases associated with defects in proteins localizing to the primary cilium or the underlying basal body.

Research Interests

In my time as a post-doctoral fellow, I developed tools to visualize with fluorescent proteins the embryonic development of the central nervous system (CNS), using genetically-altered mice as a model. My laboratory has discovered that primary cilia, a special microtubule-based organelle found in every cell, control early events in CNS development, including morphogenesis, boundary formation, neurogenesis, and nerve outgrowth. With a career based in Germany, I developed many international collaborations exploring the role of primary cilia in the development of a variety of CNS structures, including the forebrain, midbrain, and spinal cord. I am now moving into the analysis of postnatal phenotypes associated with loss of primary cilia in specific neuronal populations. We hope thereby to model some of the cognitive / neurodevelopmental defects seen in subsets of patients with so-called ciliopathies, multispectrum diseases associated with defects in proteins localizing to the primary cilium or the underlying basal body. In addition, we have recently begun to investigate the importance of primary cilia in causing some of the most common congenital heart defects seen in newborn babies.

Selected Publications

Dissertation Students

Lindsey Avery Fitzsimons