Malú Tansey, Ph.D.
Her lab focuses on the role of inflammation and immune system responses in brain health and neurodegenerative disease, with particular focus on central-peripheral neuroimmune crosstalk and the gut-brain axis, with the long-term goal of developing better therapies to delay and prevent these diseases.
Tansey obtained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Biological Sciences from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in Cell Regulation from UT Southwestern, followed by postdoctoral work in neuroscience at Washington University. As head of Chemical Genetics at Xencor, she co-invented novel soluble TNF inhibitors that have now advanced to clinical trials in Alzheimer’s disease. She returned to academia as an assistant professor of physiology at UT Southwestern in 2002 and was recruited to Emory University School of Medicine as a tenured associate professor in 2009. After 10 years at Emory and rising to the rank of full professor — where she earned several mentoring awards from students and faculty for her efforts in championing early-stage investigators, women and other under-represented groups in STEM — in 2019, she was recruited to the department of Neuroscience in the College of Medicine at the University of Florida, as the Norman and Susan Fixel Chair in Neuroscience and Neurology and director of the Center for Translational Research in Neurodegenerative Disease. She also served on the executive committees for the McKnight Brain Institute and the Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases.