Coleen T. Murphy is a geneticist and

Richard B. Fisher Richard B. Fisher (1936 – December 16, 2004) was president and chairman of the securities firm Morgan Stanley. Early life and education Fisher was born in Philadelphia. In 1944 at age 8, Fisher contracted a severe case of polio. Doctors told ...

Preceptor in Integrative Genomics Professor of Molecular Biology at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. She is director of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories For Aging Research at Princeton.

Education

Murphy completed a B.S. with honors in biochemical and biophysical sciences at the University of Houston and earned a Ph.D. at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

with

James A. Spudich James A. Spudich () is an American scientist and professor. He is the Douglass M. and Nola Leishman Professor of Biochemistry and of Cardiovascular Disease at Stanford University and works on the molecular basis of muscle contraction. He was awar ...

as her advisor. She was awarded a graduate fellowship at

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, fil ...

and completed her postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco.

Research interests

Murphy's lab at Princeton focuses on identifying

transcriptional Transcription is the process of copying a segment of DNA into RNA. The segments of DNA transcribed into RNA molecules that can encode proteins are said to produce messenger RNA (mRNA). Other segments of DNA are copied into RNA molecules calle ...

targets related to

longevity The word " longevity" is sometimes used as a synonym for "life expectancy" in demography. However, the term ''longevity'' is sometimes meant to refer only to especially long-lived members of a population, whereas ''life expectancy'' is always d ...

, using the roundworm ''

Caenorhabditis elegans ''Caenorhabditis elegans'' () is a free-living transparent nematode about 1 mm in length that lives in temperate soil environments. It is the type species of its genus. The name is a blend of the Greek ''caeno-'' (recent), ''rhabditis'' (ro ...

'' as a model. Early in her career, Murphy and her postdoctoral mentor

Cynthia Kenyon Cynthia Jane Kenyon (born February 21, 1954) is an American molecular biologist and biogerontologist known for her genetic dissection of aging in a widely used model organism, the roundworm ''Caenorhabditis elegans''. She is the vice president of ...

determined that by deactivating one ''C. elegans'' gene, called "'' daf-2''", the worms' life expectancy doubled and they expressed a delayed

senescence Senescence () or biological aging is the gradual deterioration of functional characteristics in living organisms. The word ''senescence'' can refer to either cellular senescence or to senescence of the whole organism. Organismal senescence inv ...

, showing marked behavioral improvements in long-term memory, working memory, and navigational capabilities as compared to the control. The specific longevity genes she is interested in relate to communication between different types of tissue. Once these genetic pathways in different tissue types are identified, they can be monitored '' in vitro'' in ''C. elegans''. Since many of the genetic pathways in ''C. elegans'' are comparable to those in other organisms, including a 40% overlap with the human genome, Murphy's work is providing a better understanding of how genes related to longevity in humans express themselves, and how the breakdown of communication pathways between tissues during aging occurs. Murphy's lab developed a new suite of techniques that allow for localized tissue sampling, allowing research into these differentiated signal pathways in various tissue types within the same organism to take place. Based on the success of her early work, the National Institutes of Health awarded Murphy a NIH Pioneer Award in 2015. In 2016, Murphy was selected as a faculty scholar by the

References

External links

Coleen T. Murphy at Princeton University

Glenn Laboratories for Aging Research at Princeton University
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Murphy, Coleen T. 21st-century American women Living people Longevity researchers Princeton University faculty American geneticists American women biochemists American biophysicists Women biophysicists American women geneticists American women medical researchers Stanford University alumni University of Houston alumni Year of birth missing (living people) American women academics