Elly Tanaka

Elly Tanaka received her Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of California, San Francisco in 1993. She went on to do her post-doctoral work with Jeremy Brockes at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and University College London, where she started her work on regeneration. She then moved to the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, in Dresden, Germany in 1997 to take on a position as a group leader. In 2008, she was appointed to her current position as Professor for Animal Models of Regeneration at the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden.

Tanaka’s group is interested in understanding the factors that trigger regeneration in a model vertebrate with the ultimate goal of understanding which mechanisms are limiting in mammals. They use limb regeneration in Axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) as a model to examine which tissues give rise to the progenitor cells that drive regeneration, define the features of the progenitor cells that drive regeneration, and determine what triggers the regeneration process.

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