Malu G. Tansey, PhD

Bio

Malú Gámez Tansey, PhD, is a professor of neurology and the James A. Caplin MD, Chair in Alzheimer’s Disease at the Indiana University School of Medicine. She is also the director of the Neuroimmunology Research Group and the executive associate director of education at the Stark Neuroscience Research Institute. Dr. Tansey joined the IU School of Medicine faculty in January 2025.

Her lab focuses on the role of inflammation and immune system responses in brain health and neurodegenerative disease, with particular focus on central-peripheral neuroimmune crosstalk and the gut-brain axis. The long-term goal of the lab is to develop better therapies to prevent and/or delay these diseases.

Dr. Tansey obtained her bachelor's degree and master's degree in biological sciences from Stanford University and her PhD in cell regulation from UT Southwestern. She then completed postdoctoral work in neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis. As the head of chemical genetics at Xencor, she co-invented novel soluble TNF inhibitors that have now advanced to clinical trials in Alzheimer’s disease. She returned to academia as an assistant professor of physiology at UT Southwestern in 2002 and was recruited to Emory University School of Medicine as a tenured associate professor in 2009. After 10 years at Emory and rising to the rank of professor, where she earned several mentoring awards from students and faculty for her efforts in championing early-stage investigators, women and other underrepresented groups in STEM, she was recruited in 2019 to the Department of Neuroscience in the College of Medicine at the University of Florida as the Norman and Susan Fixel Chair in Neuroscience and Neurology and director of the Center for Translational Research in Neurodegenerative Disease. She also served on the executive committees for the McKnight Brain Institute and the Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases. Dr. Tansey has also been a member of the World Parkinson Coalition since 2021 and currently serves as vice president and has attended all but the first World Parkinson Congresses since inception.

Dr. Tansey has mentored 19 pre-doctoral trainees, one MD-PhD student, 11 postdoctoral trainees, five early-stage investigators, and all or of them are still engaged in research or research-related activities. She is currently mentoring one MD-PhD student, one postdoctoral trainee, and three early-stage research-track investigators. Dr. Tansey’s lab employs rigorous multiple in vivo and in vitro models to define gene x environment interactions that protect or predispose individuals towards development of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other ADRDs like Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). Because the immune system is the arbiter of this GxE interplay, her lab investigates cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate innate and adaptive immune responses and their impact on neuro-immune signaling and her group is the first to discover the role of immune-cell exhaustion in mediating the effects of PD-associated LRRK2 mutations. 

Dr. Tansey has also embarked upon studies to investigate chronic systemic inflammatory disease on human brain health and cognition, including the role of stress, gut inflammation (dysbiosis, infections, and colitis) on central nervous system pathologies. Her track record of over 150 publications in high- profile journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Reviews Immunology, Nature Reviews
Neurology, Science Translational Medicine, PNAS, J Neuroscience, Glia, Molecular
Therapy, Neurobiology of Disease, Movement Disorders, Molecular Neurodegeneration,
and Brain Behavior and Immunity, with an h-index of 71 and an i-10 index of 134 with nearly 20,000 citations underscore her ability to provide rigorous training and unbiased experiments design/methodology/analysis/interpretation and reporting of results. The long-term goal of Dr. Tansey’s research is to identify novel neuroprotective immunomodulatory therapies to delay, halt or prevent neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders.