Tanya S. Freedman PhD

Dr. Freedman is an Assistant Professor of Pharmacology, housed in the Center for Immunology at the University of Minnesota (UMN). She is also a member of the UMN Masonic Cancer Center's Immunology Program and the Center for Autoimmune Diseases Research. She received her AB degree with honors in Biochemistry from Bowdoin College (Brunswick, ME) before moving to UC Berkeley to enter the Ph.D. program in Molecular and Cell Biology. Working jointly in the laboratories of Drs. John Kuriyan and Susan Marqusee, Dr. Freedman discovered structural and dynamic mechanisms underlying differential allosteric activation of the Ras-activating proteins Sos and RasGRF1. As a postdoc with Dr. Arthur Weiss at UCSF, she discovered a mechanism by which the Src-family kinase Lynn tunes macrophage sensitivity to pro-inflammatory activation, a process with implications for myeloid-cell hypersensitization in autoimmune disease. Dr. Freedman's independent research program at UMN focuses on how myeloid cells integrate positive- and negative-regulatory signals to achieve tissue-specific functions and drive pathologies from autoimmune diseases to breast cancer. Protein tyrosine kinases, including Lyn and the other Src-family kinases, are modulators of cell sensitivity, and thus cell- and receptor-specific modes of kinase regulation and function are areas of special interest to her lab.