MD/PhD Student

Hanna is our native Minnesotan of the lab, so don’t be surprised by the way she says “bag” or throws in a “doncha know” or an “uff da” every now and then. She graduated from the University of Minnesota where she spent most of her time playing music with the marching band and cheering on Gopher sports, but somehow, she also managed to get a chemistry degree. In her free time, she became president of her sorority, volunteered at a hospital, and did medicinal chemistry research, which led her here to UIUC for the Medical Scholars Program. She insists that the University of Illinois feels like they took the University of Minnesota and put it in the middle of a cornfield, so it still feels a bit like home. In fact, she continues to wear her Minnesota gear around campus and can usually be found watching Gopher football in lab on Saturdays.

Hanna joined the lab in August 2014 and jumped right in on the IQGAP1 project. She finds it fascinating that IQGAP1 acts as a scaffold protein to integrate signaling and thus can affect many different aspects of cell biology and physiology. Our lab’s interest in this protein arose from the finding that our DKO mice have elevated expression of IQGAP1 prior to spontaneous development of liver tumors (Anakk, 2013) and that loss of IQGAP1 leads to smaller and less frequent tumors in another model of spontaneous liver cancer (Schmidt, 2008). Hanna’s major focus is on the role of IQGAP1 in hepatocellular carcinoma and whether this overexpression of IQGAP1 is sufficient to drive tumorigenesis. However, since tumor studies involve a lot of waiting around for tumors to form, she is also looking at characterizing the metabolic differences in mice lacking IQGAP1.

In her free time here at UIUC, Hanna enjoys watching sports (mostly hockey and football), spending weekend nights in downtown Champaign, and taking medical school classes (this enjoyment is debatable). She is also rather fond of organizing and labeling. If you find a new label show up in the lab, she was probably the one who put it there.