Biology

Dr. Kristin Giamanco

203-837-8968

I teach upper-level Biology courses including Developmental Biology and Cell Biology, both of which have a laboratory component. In addition, I have taught sections of Genetics labs.

About Me

I earned a Bachelor of Arts from Bryn Mawr College where I majored in Biology and minored in Chemistry and Mathematics. As an undergraduate, I engaged in summer research experiences which strengthened my desire to attend graduate school. In particular, I became fascinated with neuroscience and entered a graduate program at SUNY Upstate Medical University to pursue these interests. I completed my Ph.D. in the laboratory of Dr. Russell T. Matthews where I focused on understanding how a specialized substructure in the neural extracellular matrix known as the perineuronal net forms.

Next, I moved to New York City and completed my postdoctoral fellowship at Weill Cornell Medical College in the Brain and Mind Research Institute in the laboratory of Dr. Margaret Elizabeth Ross, where I currently am an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Research in Neuroscience. There I sought to unravel how particular proteins guide neural progenitors through the cell cycle. This work was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

While I was a postdoctoral fellow, I also was an Adjunct Professor at Marymount Manhattan College where I taught general chemistry laboratory sections and Human Biology, a course for non-majors. I started at WCSU in Fall 2016 after discovering that my passion was to engage students in hands-on, experiential learning in both the classroom and the laboratory.

Research

The Giamanco laboratory seeks to further understand the role of the D-type cyclins in mediating cell division in the developing mouse brain. This information will shed light on how disorders characterized by aberrant cell division manifest including megalencephaly and microcephaly. This project is carried out in collaboration with colleagues at Weill Cornell Medical College.
I am also interested in developing culture models in which we can more thoroughly study how perineuronal nets form. More specifically, I want to identify how the molecular constituents arrange at the cellular surface to form these enigmatic structures. This work involves collaborative efforts with Dr. Russell T. Matthews.
Students working in my laboratory will gain experience with the following techniques: maintaining and propagating immortalized cell lines, generating primary cultures, immunocytochemistry, and fluorescence microscopy.