Elly Margaret Tanaka | |
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Born | Elly Margaret Tanaka |
Alma mater | |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | molecular biology, regeneration |
Institutions |
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Thesis | (1993) |
Doctoral advisor | Marc W. Kirschner |
Website | www |
Elly Margaret Tanaka (born 22 August 1965) is a biochemist and senior scientist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria. Tanaka studies the molecular cell biology of limb and spinal cord regeneration as well as the evolution of regeneration.
Tanaka was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and obtained a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Harvard University in 1987 and a PhD from the University of California, San Francisco in 1993, where she had worked in the lab of Marc W. Kirschner. [1] She then became a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Jeremy Brockes at University College London and Ludwig Institute. [1]
Tanaka started her own lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden (Germany) in 1999. [1] Her research focused on axolotl spinal cord regeneration. [1]
In 2008, Tanaka became a professor at the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) of the Technische Universität Dresden. [1] She became director of the center in 2014, [2] before becoming senior scientist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna in 2016. [3] The Mexican salamander species axolotl is Tanaka's main model system for her research and is also working to translate them to mouse and human tissue. [4] Using innovative molecular biology and microscopy methods, she identified those stem cells that underlie the regeneration of limbs and the spinal cord. [5] She is a member of the Editorial Board for Developmental Cell . [6]
Tanaka was elected a member of the Academia Europaea in 2015, [2] of the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2017, the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2021, [7] [8] and the National Academy of Sciences in 2023. [9] She was awarded the Ernst Schering Prize in 2017, highlighting Tanaka as "the leading expert in the field of regeneration biology". [5] In 2018, she was awarded the Erwin Schrödinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for lifetime achievements. [10] In 2020, she was awarded the FEBS | EMBO Women in Science Award. [11]
Regeneration in biology is the process of renewal, restoration, and tissue growth that makes genomes, cells, organisms, and ecosystems resilient to natural fluctuations or events that cause disturbance or damage. Every species is capable of regeneration, from bacteria to humans. Regeneration can either be complete where the new tissue is the same as the lost tissue, or incomplete after which the necrotic tissue becomes fibrotic.
The Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) is a biomedical research center, which conducts curiosity-driven basic research in the molecular life sciences.
The Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) is an independent biomedical research organisation founded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim. The institute employs around 250 people from over 40 countries, who perform basic research. IMBA is located at the Vienna BioCenter (VBC) and shares facilities and scientific training programs with the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (GMI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), the basic research center of Boehringer Ingelheim.
Angelika Amon was an Austrian American molecular and cell biologist, and the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Amon's research centered on how chromosomes are regulated, duplicated, and partitioned in the cell cycle. Amon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
The Ernst Schering Prize is awarded annually by the Ernst Schering Foundation for especially outstanding basic research in the fields of medicine, biology or chemistry anywhere in the world. Established in 1991 by the Ernst Schering Research Foundation, and named after the German apothecary and industrialist, Ernst Christian Friedrich Schering, who founded the Schering Corporation, the prize is now worth €50,000.
Max Luciano Birnstiel was a Swiss molecular biologist who held a number of positions in scientific leadership in Europe, including the chair of the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Zurich from 1972–86, and that of founding director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna from 1986 to 1996. His research focused on gene regulation in eukaryotes. His research group is sometimes cited as the first to purify single genes, the ribosomal RNA genes from Xenopus laevis, three years before the successful isolation of the lac operon. He is also recognized for one of the earliest discoveries of a gene enhancer element. Birnstiel died in 2014 of heart failure during cancer treatment.
Barry J. Dickson is an Australian neurobiologist who studies the development of neuronal networks in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Dickson is a group leader at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Loudoun County, Virginia and a former scientific director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria.
The Vienna BioCenter is a cluster of life science research institutes and biotechnology companies located in the 3rd municipal District of Vienna, Austria. It grew around the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), which opened in 1988. The entities at the Vienna BioCenter employ more than 2,000 people, including 600 students.
Erwin Friedrich Wagner is an Austrian biochemist known for his research on the molecular basis of cancer and associated conditions such as inflammation and cachexia. He was deputy director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) in Madrid, Spain, until 2019. Since 2019, Wagner is a group leader affiliated with the Medical University of Vienna.
Denise P. Barlow was a British geneticist who worked in the field of epigenomics. Barlow was an elected member of European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), an honorary professor of genetics at the University of Vienna and recipient of the Erwin Schrödinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 1991, she discovered the first mammalian imprinted gene, IGF2R, which codes for the insulin-like growth factor.
Tim Clausen is a structural biologist and a senior scientist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria.
Catherina Gwynne Becker is an Alexander von Humboldt Professor at TU Dresden, and was formerly Professor of Neural Development and Regeneration at the University of Edinburgh.
Jan-Michael Peters is a cell- and molecular biologist. Since 2013, he is Scientific Director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna.
Alexander Stark is a biochemist and computational biologist working on the regulation of gene expression in development. He is a senior scientist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) at the Vienna Biocenter and adjunct professor of the Medical University of Vienna.
Meinrad Busslinger is a biochemist and immunologist, renown for his work on B cells. He is a Senior Scientist and Scientific Deputy Director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria.
Ole Kiehn is a Danish-Swedish neuroscientist. He is Professor of Integrative Neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and professor of neurophysiology at Karolinska Institute, Sweden.
Claire Julie Liliane Wyart is a French neuroscientist and biophysicist, studying the circuits underlying the control of locomotion. She is a chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite.
Dedifferentiation is a transient process by which cells become less specialized and return to an earlier cell state within the same lineage. This suggests an increase in cell potency, meaning that, following dedifferentiation, a cell may possess the ability to re-differentiate into more cell types than it did prior to dedifferentiation. This is in contrast to differentiation, where differences in gene expression, morphology, or physiology arise in a cell, making its function increasingly specialized.
Andrea Pauli is a developmental biologist and biochemist studying how the egg transitions into an embryo, and more specifically the molecular mechanisms underlying vertebrate fertilisations, egg dormancy, and subsequent egg activation. Her lab uses zebrafish as the main model organism. Andrea Pauli is a group leader at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) at the Vienna Biocenter in Austria.