The Facility

The Molecular Biology Core Facility is located in room 2-22, on the second floor of Building 119 on the VA campus. Need directions? 

 

The facility houses a Beckman CEQ 8000 genetic analyzer, Syngene G:box XX6 imager,  Agilent 2100 Bioanalyzer, Agilent 2200 Tapestation, Eppendorf epMotion 5070 robot, Turner Biosystems Modulus Microplate reader, Bio-Rad Cfx96,  Eppendorf Gradient Mastercycler, Bio-Rad Bio-Plex Mag-Pix, Protein Simple Abby Western blotting system, and Nanodrop One spectrophotometer, along with a variety of other molecular biology equipment.

Personnel

Dr. Michelle Duffourc

Director

Dr. Michelle M. Duffourc is a neuroscience researcher and teacher. She is the recipient of 24 grants as PI, Co-I or collaborator totaling over $3,500,000.  As Director of the MBCF, Dr. Duffourc has  aided investigators in obtaining over $60,000,000 in extramural funding. She is always happy to help investigators in any way that supports their research goals.

 Dr. Duffourc is an experienced teacher of molecular biology techniques. Besides training undergraduate, medical and graduate students, she has taught classes in DNA sequencing and served as a faculty member in ETSUs acclaimed Methods in Molecular Biology Workshop. Her teaching efforts have resulted in her being honored with over 40 individual and joint teaching awards and honors – including the QCOM Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Award - the highest teaching honor awarded at QCOM/ETSU, the Caduceus Club awards for Outstanding Professor and Outstanding Course, and the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) Pharmacology Education Award.  She has also been named to Who's Who Among America's Teachers.

Dr. Duffourc received her doctoral degree in Basic Medical Sciences with a specialization in Pharmacology from the University of South Alabama School of Medicine and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology from the same institution. In 1998 she joined the faculty at the James H. Quillen College of Medicine at East Tennessee State University where she currently is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences and Adjunct Associate Professor of Pathology and Biological Sciences.

Dr. Regenia Campbell

Assistant Director

Dr. Regenia Campbell can often be found surrounded by poop. She is our facility’s go -to expert for all things related to the microbiome and has published on the role of fecal flora in both heart failure and sexually transmitted infections. Her research interests all focus on the role our environment plays in whether we will respond to a disease intervention. Current projects include work on how gut microbes may impact neural signaling in heart failure (for which she is funded by the American Heart Association) and the influence of the maternal microbiome on childhood obesity in breastfed infants.
 
Dr. Campbell teaches in the second-year medical curriculum where she shares her knowledge of anatomy, physiology, microbiology, and neuroscience. She must do a pretty good job because sometimes she is nominated for teaching awards. Dr. Campbell cares a lot about scientific outreach and especially likes making candy DNA models with five-year-olds. She is impassioned to ride her double-helix-induced sugar high to make science accessible to often forgotten populations and is convinced that increasing scientific literacy among senior citizens may one day save the world.
 
Dr. Campbell received her doctoral degree in Biomedical Science with a specialization in Microbiology here at East Tennessee State University. Her dissertation work explored how antibiotic exposure induced a treatment-resistant phenotype in chlamydia genital infections. Her five years spent getting too well acquainted with the wrong end of a mouse was recently rewarded when her work influenced the CDC to change the treatment guidelines for chlamydial infections in pregnant women. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Neurocardiology. Dr. Campbell joined the faculty at the James H. Quillen College of Medicine at ETSU in 2021, where she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Education.