Meet Our Spring 2025 Faculty Spotlight

                   Elizabeth Duncan | Duncan Lab

Tell us a little about yourself.

How long have you been with the department? 
Almost 7 years…!

What motivated you to come to our department? 
The uniquely strong focus on regeneration biology, the impressive number of non-traditional model organisms used in our research, and the incredibly supportive people.

Where did you live before starting at UK? 
Kansas City, MO.

Describe your time with the department so far. What are you most proud or excited about? 
We have some really great projects going on in the lab and it’s exciting to see ideas turn into real data and papers. But I’m most proud to have recruited a great group of people that all work hard and with kindness and integrity. 

What draws you to your work? 
I think it’s the combination of problem-solving and physical/technical work. I love testing a new protocol or hypothesis. 

What is your favorite part of your job? 
Doing experiments will always be my favorite part of being a scientist, although as a professor I don’t get much time at the bench. Now I love the moments when my trainees show me how they have figured out a problem on their own or come up with a good experiment.

What is the most challenging part of your job? 
Time management. There are so many different plates to spin (teaching, mentoring, writing grants and papers, managing lab operations, etc.) and it’s really hard to keep them all going strong.

What’s your favorite course to teach and why? 
I’ve grown to love teaching Cell Biology (BIO315). It can be overwhelming because the topic encompasses nearly everything in biology, but I have found or developed many good resources that help students connect the basic research (i.e., experiments that uncovered how cells work) with outcomes the students care about (e.g., how it applies to healthcare and their own lives).

Tell us about your research interests and why you are passionate about them. Is this something you’ve been working on throughout your career or has it changed over time? 
I’ve always been interested in how the genome is regulated in order to generate different traits. I’ve moved between model organisms (mice, embryonic stem cells, planarians) but that interest remains a strong focus of my research. When I was looking for a postdoc position, I really wanted to examine this connection between genotype and phenotype in an organism with a “cool” trait. Regeneration won by a landslide. 

What do you want the public to know about your research? 
That it takes a lot of time and careful thought to design good experiments and do them well. Even when our hypothesis is well-supported by prior results, we’ve consulted other experts in our field, and we plan and execute everything carefully, the data often prove us wrong. Yet once and a while we get a result that surprises us and reveals something exciting. This is why it is important to do experiments! And why research experience is such a valuable teaching tool for students.

What do you consider to be your greatest achievement in your career? 
I hope that discovery is still to come! But if I were to choose one achievement, it would be when I identified the enzyme that “clips” the tail off histone H3 as a graduate student. Protease activity can be really tricky to study, as we are usually more focused on inhibiting protease activity when isolating proteins. But I had observed evidence of proteolytic cleavage during a specific window of stem cell differentiation and my PhD advisor and I were determined to identify the enzyme responsible. The moment when I realized that I had figured it out was the most exciting of my career. That feeling stays with you and motivates you to work through the next hard problem. 

What is something that you wish others (students, colleagues) knew about what you do? 
I think everyone should cut a planarian in half and watch how it regenerates two new worms in the next few days. It’s even more amazing when you see it with your own eyes.

If you could share one piece of advice with students, what would it be? 
Everybody fails in science. The best scientists figure out how to learn from their failures.

How do you spend your free time? 
Watching my kids play sports and washing their dirty uniforms! In between I try to get some exercise myself, usually by running outside.

If you weren’t a biologist, what would you be doing? 
I was on my way to medical school when I fell in love with research, so I would probably be a doctor. 

If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be? 
PB&J

If you could meet one famous person, dead or alive, who would it be and why? 
As a former English literature major, I’d probably say Queen Elizabeth I. She’s such a fascinating character, particularly how she found a way to acquire significant and enduring power when very little was expected of her.