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Mark G. Keen Teaching Assistant Professor of Microbiology 1567C Gardner Hall Campus Box 7615 (919) 513-1439 (voice) |
Biographical Sketch
Mark G. Keen was born and raised in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The youngest of three children, he lived at home and worked his way through Western Kentucky University as a hospital ward clerk. He received a B.S. degree in Biology with a minor in Chemistry in 1978 and proceeded directly to graduate school in Raleigh, North Carolina where, under the direction of Drs. Thoyd Melton and Walter Dobrogosz, he characterized the regulation of nitrogen assimilation enzymes in Salmonella typhimurium and subsequently received his M.S. in Microbiology in 1980. Mark then worked briefly at Vanderbilt University until he started as a pre-doctoral student in Microbiology at the University of Georgia in Athens in August of 1981. In Athens, he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Bill Finnerty on the genetics of alkane oxidation in Acinetobacter calcoaceticus. While at UGA, Mark met Dr. Paul S. Hoffman, a visiting professor, and decided in 1983 to follow him to the University of Tennessee in Memphis to conduct research on the metabolism and genetics of the Legionnaire's disease bacterium, Legionella pneumophila. After receiving his Ph.D. degree from UT-M in 1987, Mark then post-doc'd for three years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conducting research on the agent of syphilis, Treponema pallidum and getting married to his wonderful wife, Anne. After Chapel Hill, he spent two years as a National Research Council/Centers for Disease Control fellow at the CDC's Center for Vector-borne Diseases in Fort Collins, Colorado investigating the Lyme disease agent, Borrelia burgdorferi. In 1992 industry came knocking and Mark accepted a position as a Senior Research Scientist in Product Development at Roche Molecular Systems in New Jersey where, in five years, he became a father (a wonderful boy named Paul) and contributed as part of the team that developed HIV Monitor, the first PCR-based, FDA-approved human diagnostic test that could determine patient viral load. After Roche, Mark moved to North Carolina (for the third time!) in 2000 and accepted a teaching position at Louisburg College, where he taught general biology and microbiology for two years before arriving at NC State's Department of Microbiology in 2002.