Jason Tennessen PhD
Associate Professor of Biology
2001-2007 Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology and Genetics University of Minnesota.
2001 Bachelor of Arts in Biology, magna cum laude Lawrence University.
Jay Tourigny
Jay hails from the Northeast, with stints in North Carolina at Duke and in the former Zentner Lab of epigenomics here at IU. He has a multitude of roles now in the Tennessen group, from the lab managerial to HTS data analysis to his own bench and computational projects characterizing ERR (and related factors) binding to the genome. He also continues his studies on the side with the Hahn Lab (https://hahnlab.sitehost.iu.edu/research.html)
Madhulika Rai PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Madhulika obtained her Masters from BITS-Pilani, India and her PhD degree from the University of Pompeu Fabra- Barcelona, Spain under the supervision of Dr. Cayetano Gonzalez.
Currently, she is interested in understanding the role of lactate in normal development and in tumor progression by using Drosophila melanogaster as the model system.
Nader Mahmoudzadeh
Graduate Student
Nader completed his undergraduate work at the University of Houston. He is a graduate student, and is interested in the response to hypoxia in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, and the possible role of the oncometabolite L-2-hydroxygluterate (L2HG) in this process.
Yasaman Heidarian
Graduate Student
Yasaman completed her undergraduate and master work on signaling pathways in ovarian cancer at the University of Tehran. She then joined Cancer Research Center of Iran where she worked on Oxytocin role in breast cancer. She is a graduate student studying L-2HG role in a Drosophila model of renal cancer.
Tess Fasteen
Tess completed her B.S. in Biology at Indiana University, where she worked in early stage drug development and studied DNA damage and repair. She is a graduate student studying the molecular control of aerobic glycolysis using the model Drosophila melanogaster.
Eric Kilbourn
Shefali Shefali
Shefali completed her undergraduate in Biochemical Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. During her undergrad she also worked at InStem, Bangalore where she studied light sensing and neural regeneration in the model system - Planaria. She is currently a graduate student at our lab and is interested in studying how the glycolytic enzyme Glycerol-3-Phosphate Dehydrogenase 1 (GPDH1) regulates development in fruit flies.
Prince Okah
Sophie Ann Fleck
Sophie obtained her B.S. in biochemistry at Montana State University. She is a Ph.D. student studying the role of ERR in reproduction and metabolism in adult female Drosophila.
Undergraduates
Josh Gerstein
Emma Rose Gallant