Kristen J Verhey

Dr. Verhey received her B.S. in Biology from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology from Harvard University working in the laboratory of Dr. Morris Birnbaum. She completed her postdoctoral work in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School working under the guidance of Dr. Tom Rapoport. She joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School’s Department of Cell and Developmental Biology in 2002 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2008. In 2013, Dr. Verhey was installed as the inaugural A. Kent Christensen Collegiate Professor and promoted to Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology.

The Verhey lab studies intracellular trafficking in mammalian cells with a focus on how the microtubule cytoskeleton serves as roads for transport by kinesin motor proteins. A major focus has been to understand how kinesin proteins are regulated – how do they bind to the right cargo? how do they know which direction to go? what happens after cargo delivery? Work from the Verhey lab has shown that in the absence of cargo, kinesin proteins are kept inactive by an auto-inhibition mechanism. Cargo binding relieves this auto-inhibition, allowing the kinesin motor to find a microtubule track and begin its journey. The Verhey lab has been at the forefront of advancing the hypothesis that there is a tubulin code in which specific microtubules are biochemically marked to regulate trafficking events, analogous to the histone code model which states that specific regions of chromatin are biochemically marked to regulate transcriptional events. More recently, work in the Verhey lab has turned to trafficking mechanisms in cilia and flagella which are organelles that protrude from the cell surface and play important roles in cell motility (beating) and in sensing the extracellular environment. Their work has provided the first evidence that entry into the ciliary compartment is a regulated event and utilizes mechanisms similar to those that regulate entry into the nuclear compartment.