Biography

Kevin D. Gillis is a professor and the interim chair of the Department of Biomedical, Biological and Chemical Engineering at the University of Missouri with a joint appointment in the Department of Medical Pharmacology and Physiology at MU’s School of Medicine. He is also an investigator at MU’s Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center. His current research includes developing microchip devices to assay cell secretion. Gillis also is working on research that seeks to characterize fast and slow Ca2+ sensing for exocytosis in individual cells using state-of-the-art optical and patch-clamp techniques, which allow both fine control of [Ca2+] and high-time-resolution measurements of the kinetics of exocytosis. His project’s central hypothesis is that there are multiple Ca2+ sensors that control distinct steps in exocytosis.