Tatiana Kuzmenko

Phone: 310.338.5776
Email: tkuzmenk@lmu.edu
Office: Bruce Featherston Life Sciences 216

Tatiana Kuzmenko earned her BS and MS in Evolutional Biology from Moscow State University in Russia. There she did research on the evolution of social behavior in ants and how different species of ants adapt various social structures investing into generalized or specialized foraging strategies, for example. After exploring the evolutionary bases of behavior, Tatiana had an opportunity to dive dipper into the molecular mechanisms governing behavior changes at the Molecular and Computational Biology department, in the University of Southern California where she earned her MS in Molecular Biology. There she explored variations in gene expression inside the brain of ants performing different tasks in the colony as well as between different ant species. That required lots of ant brain surgeries, which is a quite useful life skill. She is certain that from the evolutionary standpoint, social animals, including human, share some general traits in the ways we learn and remember things. Tatiana enjoys learning and teaching about Neurobiology and she implements its concepts into her teaching style: engaging students through excitement and curiosity, the true drivers of learning. Over the past eight years she has been working with the great team of passionate LMU faculty and TAs on her favorite project: research-based General Biology Labs at LMU. Other Tatiana’s interests include medicinal plants, outdoor sports, camping with her family and exploring nature.