Vilma Yuzbasiyan-Gurkan, Ph.D.
| Vilma Yuzbasiyan-Gurkan, Ph.D., obtained her bachelor degree from Vassar College majoring in Biochemistry in 1978. She continued her education in a doctoral program in Biochemistry with a strong medical component at the University of Istanbul focusing on copper and zinc handling and their disorders in pediatric patients. Upon completion of her degree, she joined the University of Michigan Department of Human Genetics as a post-doctoral fellow and focused on Wilson disease. While working on a canine model of Wilson disease, canine hereditary copper toxicosis, she started to develop mapping tools for the canine genome. This led to the identification of a novel locus for copper transport. She has since been working on comparative genetics. Her research group has recently focused on characterization of resident stem cells from tissues in the adult canine, especially mesenchymal stem cells, and studying them both for their reparative potential and for probing them to understand mechanisms of tumorigenesis. Her group has recently provided the first report of the isolation and characterization of mesenchymal stem cells from the dog adipose tissue. |
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