Naveen Kumar Tangudu

Postdoctoral Fellow

Naveen was born and brought up in India. Since his school days, he has been fascinated with biology and joined as an undergraduate (B.Sc.,) in Biotechnology, Zoology, Chemistry and pursued Biotechnology as a specialization in masters (M.Sc.,). In 2009, he joined as project assistant in Environmental Protection Research Institute, where he started his journey as a researcher, to investigate on tropical plant pathogens using molecular biology techniques. However, he was always enthused to work on cancer biology to find cure for cancer. In 2010, he joined as a research fellow in Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology and intensively worked on breast and colon cancer mouse models, further utilized the advances of nanoparticles to rescue the cancer in mouse models. In 2013, he started his PhD in Ulm University, Germany. During his PhD, he focused on the role of macrophage in iron disorders (hemochromatosis) and heme disorders (beta-thalassemia and sickle cell disease). Indeed, he found that macrophage ferroportin, the only known iron exporter, is crucial to maintain the systemic iron homeostasis in iron and heme disorders. In 2019, he started as a post-doctoral fellow in Ulm University to investigate on Vitamin E and C effect on macrophage ferroportin. In the Aird lab, Naveen has multiple projects related to how cell cycle disruption affects metabolism. In one, he is investigating the loss of p16 in ATR mediated metabolism via mTORC1. In a second project, he is studying iron and ferroptosis in CCNE1-driven ovarian cancers.

Naveen has received a HERA Ovarian Cancer Foundation grant and a DoD Pilot Award.

Life outside of the lab: love to spend time with family, playing squash and cricket   

Read Naveen’s co-first author review on p16 and immune surveillance here

Read Naveen’s co-first author preprint on purine metabolism as a metabolic vulnerability of p16-low cancers here

Contact Naveen: NKT13@pitt.edu