Principal Investigator

Tal Teitz, PhD

Tal Teitz is an Associate Professor at the Scintillon Research Institute. Before joining Scintillon, she served as a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Tal earned her PhD degree in Biochemistry from the University of Tel Aviv, Israel on DNA repair genes and did her postdoctoral studies at UCSF, San Francisco on β-globin gene regulation. Subsequently, she held positions as a Research Scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. During this time, her research focused on developing pre-clinical animal models and therapeutic treatments for childhood neuroblastoma. Her studies identified caspase-8 as a tumor suppressor gene silenced by epigenetic regulation in neuroblastoma. In the past decade, Dr. Teitz has directed her efforts toward the prevention and treatment of chemotherapy- and noise-induced hearing loss. Her research team identified promising FDA-approved and clinical-stage drugs that can be repurposed for hearing protection and mitigating cisplatin-induced kidney damage. Her research has resulted in 3 patents and 36 peer-reviewed publications, in high impact journals including Nature, Nature Medicine, PNAS, JEM and Science Advances.