Research Scientist

Kaleen is a research scientist focused on health, performance, and resilience at IHMC. Broadly, Kaleen’s research goals are to understand the molecular mechanisms by which the body adapts and reacts to stressors such as acute exercise, training, unloading, aging, etc. using computational biology techniques (‘omics) in order to improve human health and resilience. She is also interested in the use of exercise as a countermeasure for a range of disease conditions, including neurodegenerative diseases: her most recent work examined the molecular effects of exercise training in skeletal muscle and circulation of individuals with Parkinson’s disease.

Throughout her graduate and post-doctoral training, she has acquired numerous wet- and dry-laboratory techniques in molecular biology and biochemistry, enabling collection of high-throughput data (e.g., transcriptomics, epigenetics) along with rich phenotyping.  She is particularly interested in integrating bioinformatics analysis pipelines that detect differential expression with more sophisticated networks-based approaches in order to reveal novel connections between genes and across ‘omes. Her experience with skeletal muscle biology and exercise physiology provides critical context for data interpretation and connecting molecular patterns to whole-body and/or systems-level health.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Georgetown University; a master’s in sports nutrition and exercise science from Marywood University; and a Ph.D. human bioenergetics, Ball State University.