Kandice Tanner

Kandice Tanner is a Trinidad and Tobago biophysicist researching the metastatic traits that allow tumor cells to colonize secondary organs. She is a Stadtman principal investigator at the National Cancer Institute, where she is head of the tissue morphodynamics unit.

Kandice Tanner
NationalityTrinidad and Tobago
Alma materSouth Carolina State University
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (PhD)
Scientific career
FieldsBiophysics
InstitutionsNational Cancer Institute
Thesis"Cat"-ology: spectrally resolved neurophotonics in the mammalian brain and phantom studies (2006)
Doctoral advisorEnrico Gratton
InfluencesMina Bissell

Education

Kandice Tanner attended an all girls school in Trinidad before becoming one of the only female students at a school of 1,200 people. She intended on attending the University of the West Indies where she had already been accepted before receiving a full scholarship at the South Carolina State University.[1] In 2002, Tanner completed a dual bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and physics, summa cum laude.[2]

In 2006, she completed a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign under advisor Enrico Gratton. Her doctoral research entailed mapping functional specialization in mammalian brains.[1][3] Tanner's dissertation was titled "Cat"-ology: spectrally resolved neurophotonics in the mammalian brain and phantom studies.[4]

She conducted post-doctoral training at the University of California, Irvine specializing in dynamic imaging of thick tissues. She then became a Department of Defense Breast Cancer Post-doctoral fellow jointly at University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under Mina Bissell.[3]

Career
Tanner in her laboratory

Tanner joined the National Cancer Institute as a Stadtman Tenure-Track Investigator in July, 2012, where she integrates concepts from molecular biophysics and cell biology to learn how cells and tissues sense and respond to their physical microenvironment, and to thereby design therapeutics and cellular biotechnology. Tanner is a principal investigator in the laboratory of cell biology serving as head of the tissue morphodynamics unit.[3][5]

Research

Tanner's expertise includes multimodal imaging platforms, 3D cell culture, biophysics, mechanobiology, and breast cancer. Her laboratory focuses on understanding the metastatic traits that allow tumor cells to colonize secondary organs. Her team team includes physicists, engineers, and cancer biologists. They have determined that cells can switch between different types of motility namely rotation, random and amoeboid when placed in 3D biomimetic platforms. Tanner's lab has linked the type of motility to the establishment of distinct multicellular architectures and tissue polarity. Additionally, they use optical microscopy to uncover in vivo mechanisms of metastasis using zebrafish as an animal model. The laboratory studies are focused on understanding how physical cues from the tissue microenvironment drive organ specific metastasis.[3]

Awards and honors

Tanner was awarded the 2013 National Cancer Institute Director's Intramural Innovation Award, the 2015 NCI Leading Diversity award, Federal Technology Transfer Award in 2016 and 2018, the 2016 Young Fluorescence Investigator award from the Biophysical Society, and named as a Young Innovator in Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering in 2016 by the Biomedical Engineering Society.[3] In 2020, Tanner was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society.[6]

Selected works
  • Ulrich, Theresa A.; Jain, Amit; Tanner, Kandice; MacKay, Joanna L.; Kumar, Sanjay (2010). "Probing cellular mechanobiology in three-dimensional culture with collagen–agarose matrices". Biomaterials. 31 (7): 1875–1884. doi:10.1016/j.biomaterials.2009.10.047.
  • Tanner, K.; Mori, H.; Mroue, R.; Bruni-Cardoso, A.; Bissell, M. J. (2012). "Coherent angular motion in the establishment of multicellular architecture of glandular tissues". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 109 (6): 1973–1978. doi:10.1073/pnas.1119578109. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 3277511. PMID 22308439.
  • Tanner, Kandice; Gottesman, Michael M. (2015). "Beyond 3D culture models of cancer". Science Translational Medicine. 7 (283): 283ps9–283ps9. doi:10.1126/scitranslmed.3009367. ISSN 1946-6234. PMID 25877888.

References
  1. "Q&A: Kandice Tanner on applying physics to cancer research". Physics Today. 2019. doi:10.1063/PT.6.4.20190531a.
  2. "Kandice Tanner". National Society of Black Physicists. February 24, 2020. Retrieved 2020-05-03.
  3. "Kandice Tanner, Ph.D." Center for Cancer Research. 2014-08-12. Retrieved 2020-05-02. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
  4. Tanner, Kandice (2006). "Cat"-ology: spectrally resolved neurophotonics in the mammalian brain and phantom studies (Thesis). University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. OCLC 171149612.
  5. "Principal Investigators". NIH Intramural Research Program. Retrieved 2020-05-03.
  6. "APS Fellows Archive". Retrieved 2020-10-09.
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