Lani C. Keller

I am an educator and research scientist striving to engage and excite the next generation of scientists in research. I grew up in the wild outdoors in Alaska, where moose hunkered down in our yards and filleting salmon quickly became a biology lesson. My entire scientific career has focused on using simple biological model organisms to study complex biomedically problems. During my PhD at the University of California, San Francisco I studied a single-celled green algae to explore the protein make-up of a centriole (a small organelle within all of our cells). Through this process we determined that a large number of human disease proteins are conserved and important for creating a centriole. As a postdoctoral fellow, I studied how a simple fruit fly can be used to study the complexities of neurodegeneration (and yes flies do have brains). I now have my own lab at a teaching university with very little funding for the sciences but this does not deter me from conducting and teaching research and being generally excited about how amazing biology is.

March 2014