About Dr Susann Brady-Kalnay 
Dr Brady-Kalnay received her PhD in Anatomy and Cell Biology from the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine in 1991. Under the supervision of Dr Robert Brackenbury, she studied the control of cell migration and invasion by N-CAM-dependent adhesion. After receiving her PhD, Dr Brady-Kalnay joined the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr Nicholas Tonks. At this time, receptor protein tyrosine phosphatases (RPTPs) were just being cloned. Dr Brady-Kalnay began working on PTPmu and demonstrated that it functioned both as a tyrosine phosphatase and as a homophilic cell-cell adhesion molecule. This led to the intriguing hypothesis that RPTPs function to transduce signals in response to cell-cell adhesion. In 1995 Dr Brady-Kalnay joined the faculty of Case Western Reserve University, where she is now a full Professor. She has recently demonstrated that proteolytic cleavage of PTPmu in glioblastoma brain tumors results in shedding of an adhesive extracellular fragment of PTPmu, a finding that was exploited to design a novel molecular recognition strategy for migrating and invasive tumor cells. These findings have great clinical significance for molecular imaging of tumors and for the generation of novel theranostics.