Collene Jeter, Ph.D.

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Collene Jeter earned her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993.  She then went on to the University of Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic, where she performed leukemia research using the murine model system.  In addition to studies of engraftment and graft-versus-host disease, as a junior scientist she also had the exciting opportunity to pilot one of the first hematopoietic stem cell enrichment protocols in the field.  In 1996, she returned to Texas to continue biomedical research at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.  She then entered into the Molecular Biology graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin, performing research in a plant molecular and cellular biology laboratory. Her dissertation research project provided evidence of a novel cell-cell signaling function for extracellular nucleotides in plants.  This work was published in Plant Cell in 2004, entitled Evidence of a Novel Cell Signaling Role for Extracellular Adenosine Triphosphates and Diphosphates in Arabidopsis.  She received her Ph.D. in molecular biology in 2004, and was awarded a NIH training fellowship at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Research Center.  Dr. Jeter has since been performing experiments to elucidate the hierarchical nature of tumor cells in vitro and in vivo to determine if stem-like cells contribute to tumorigenesis.  Her most recent manuscript entitled Essential Role of the Self-Renewal Gene Nanog in Regulating Tumor Development describes novel molecular mechanisms maintaining cancer cell proliferative and tumorigenic potential, and is currently under review.  Now an American Urological Association Research Scholar and Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Jeter is working to develop an animal model to study slowly dividing label retaining cells in a tumorigenic system.

Collene is supported by a Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the American Urological Association (AUA).