Name Valerie Horsley | ||
 | ||
Getting Under Your Skin - Professor Valerie Horsley
Valerie Horsley is an American cell and developmental biologist. She is an associate professor at Yale University, where she has researched the development, regeneration and maintenance of skin cells. She is a member of the Yale Cancer Center and Yale Stem Cell Center. She received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2012.
Contents
Career
Horsley initially considered a career in medicine as a physician, but decided to pursue a research career instead. She completed a Bachelor of Science in biology at Furman University in 1998 and a PhD at Emory University in 2003. Her PhD was supervised by Grace Pavlath and focused on the transcription factors involved in the development of skeletal muscle tissue. She completed her postdoctoral training under Elaine Fuchs at Rockefeller University, where she investigated the factors that influence the development of stem cells in the skin, specifically the transcription factors Blimp-1 and NFATC1. She was a regional finalist in the 2008 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists.
Horsley joined the faculty of Yale University in 2009 and was promoted in 2011 to an associate professor in dermatology and the Maxine F. Singer '57 Associate Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. In her Yale laboratory, Horsley has studied the cellular and molecular pathways involved in the development and maintenance of skin tissue. She has researched the relationship between fat cells in the skin, wound healing, and regeneration of hair follicles, and the formation of keratinocytes during embryonic development. She studies adult stem cells in epithelial skin tissue and how they contribute to wound healing and the development of cancer.
In 2012, Horsley received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for her work on skin cell generation. The same year, she was awarded the Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award by the Genetics Society of America. Horsley's work and lab are supported by federal funding from the National Institutes of Health.