Mary Teruel, Ph.D.

The Teruel Lab studies diabetes and obesity signaling. Terminal cell differentiation is crucial for developing, maintaining, and regenerating tissues in all multi-cellular organisms. The overarching focus of the Teruel Lab is to understand how to control terminal differentiation in order to maintain a dynamic balance between progenitor and differentiated cells that ensures healthy tissue development and prevents disease. To tackle this problem, my lab developed a platform to understand adipogenesis (fat cell differentiation) and other differentiation processes based on automated live and fixed-cell microscopy and analysis tools. We simultaneously monitor and perturb cell cycle, circadian, signaling, and differentiation processes live in thousands of single cells, with the goal to understand how optimal timing of hormone stimuli and drug treatment can be used to maintain healthy fat and other tissues. To validate the relevance of our discoveries, we combine in vitro cell culture, organoid, and in vivo mouse models.