Kandice Tanner is a Trinidad and Tobago biophysicist researching the metastatic traits that allow tumor cells to colonize secondary organs. She is a Senior Investigator (full tenure) at the National Cancer Institute, where she is head of the Tissue morphodynamics section.
Early life and education
Kandice Tanner was born in Trinidad and Tobago. Her father was a manufacturing engineer and her mother stayed at home with Tanner and her siblings for 7 years before returning to the workplace. Tanner has said that her mother always knew she would become a physicist from her early affinity for math and science.[1]
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. She received full tenure in 2020. She is currently a senior principal investigator in the laboratory of cell biology serving as head of the tissue morphodynamics section.[4][6]
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 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.[4]
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.[4] In 2020, Tanner was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society.[7]
^ abcde"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.
^Tanner, Kandice (2006). "Cat"-ology: spectrally resolved neurophotonics in the mammalian brain and phantom studies (Thesis). University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. OCLC171149612.