Meet the Faculty: Kirk Mecklenburg

Kirk Mecklenburg is a professor of biology at Indiana University South Bend. He has a B.S. from Kansas University (1980) and a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University (1987). The lab he is part of is actively investigating the function of novel genes expressed in the nervous system. They use the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as a model system for analyzing cDNA’s that are specifically transcribed in the retina. They have evidence that these genes are also present in humans. Their long range goal is to determine the role of the genes in the visual system of Drosophila in order to predict their function in humans.