Mary Teruel received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Aeronautical Engineering from Stanford University. She became fascinated by the emerging field of biomedical engineering and carried out postdoctoral work in Cell Biology at Duke University developing new biological instrumentation to manipulate cells and new cutting edge microscopy techniques to monitor signaling processes using fluorescent reporters.

Mary’s goal is to understand the cell signaling principles underlying cell differentiation, focusing particularly on adipogenesis (fat cell differentiation) because of its great medical relevance in treating the current worldwide epidemics in obesity and diabetes. Her lab has pioneered the development of in vitro long-term live-cell imaging approaches that enable the identification and understanding molecular mechanisms driving the decision of progenitor cells to irreversibly commit to become adipocytes or to choose alternative cell fates.

Mary was recruited to the Dept. of Biochemistry and Drukier Institute of Children’s Health at Weill Cornell Medicine in 2020. A particular goal of her lab is to understand how dysregulated circadian rhythms cause obesity and how restoring normal circadian rhythms can treat obesity in children. Such therapies would have great utility since more than 40% of US children are overweight or obese, and there are no pharmacological treatments for obesity in children.

Mary is from Buffalo, New York, and loves snow and skiing. A particular inspiration for her work is her father, who was a surgeon-physician for many years in Buffalo, and instilled in her a passion for wanting to treat human disease.