Kerry L. Tucker, Ph.D.
Location
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.