Geetu Tuteja

Geetu Tuteja is a Professor and LAS Dean's Professor at Iowa State University's Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology (GDCB), part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. She leads the Tuteja Lab, which focuses on transcriptional regulation mechanisms in placental development, particularly trophoblast invasion. Her work integrates genomics, computational biology, and experimental approaches to study placental disorders like preeclampsia.

Education: B.A. in Computer Science from Boston University (2004); Ph.D. in Genomics and Computational Biology from the University of Pennsylvania (2009). Postdoctoral research at Stanford University (2010-2015) under Gill Bejerano. Joined Iowa State as an assistant professor in 2015, promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2020, and full professor in 2024.

Research Interests: Transcriptional networks, enhancer elements, trophoblast biology, placental disorders, and computational analysis of genomic data. Techniques include ATAC-seq, single-cell RNAseq, and gene network modeling.

Awards: Pew Biomedical Scholar (2019, first at Iowa State), NIH R01 funding, and the Geoffroy Faculty Fellowship (2015-2018).

Labs/Teams: Tuteja Lab focuses on placental genomics, combining molecular, computational, and systems approaches. Current projects explore trophoblast invasion mechanisms and placenta-brain axis interactions.