Rate My Professor Tanya Cully

Dr Tanya Cully is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Physiology, School of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Otago. She holds a Bachelor of Biomedical Sciences with Honours and a PhD, completed at the University of Queensland, Australia, where she also undertook her first postdoctoral position. Subsequently, she conducted a second postdoctoral fellowship at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, United States. Now leading the Cully Lab—one of eight membrane and ion transport research laboratories in her department—her career centers on advancing understanding of skeletal muscle physiology through investigations into calcium handling and redox signaling mechanisms.

The core of Cully's research involves quantifying calcium and reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels and movements within the triadic microdomain of skeletal muscle fibers to elucidate their crosstalk and regulation of muscle function in health and disease states via triadic homeostasis. Her lab applies advanced techniques including live-cell confocal microscopy on mechanically skinned and intact fibers, western blotting, viral transductions, and electroporation. Supervised projects encompass ROS in skeletal muscle, ROS-mitochondria interactions in aging muscle, and NOX4 inhibition in dystrophic skeletal muscle. Notable publications include Loehr, J. A., Latchman, H. K., Murphy, R. M., & Cully, T. R. (2025). Extraction of total protein from cardiomyocytes and Western blotting analysis, in Cardiomyocytes: Methods and Protocols; Cully, T. R., Choi, R. H., Bjorksten, A. R., Stephenson, D. G., Murphy, R. M., & Launikonis, B. S. (2018). Junctional membrane Ca²⁺ dynamics in human muscle fibers are altered by malignant hyperthermia causative RyR mutation. PNAS 115(32):8215-8220; Launikonis, B. S., Cully, T. R., Csernoch, L., & Stephenson, D. G. (2018). NHE- and diffusion-dependent proton fluxes across the tubular system membranes of fast-twitch muscle fibers of the rat. Journal of General Physiology 150(1):95-110; Loehr, J. A., Wang, S., Cully, T. R., et al. (2018). NADPH oxidase mediates microtubule alterations and diaphragm dysfunction in dystrophic mice. eLife 7:e31732; and Gonano, L. A. et al. (2022). Regulation of cardiac ryanodine receptor function by the cyclic-GMP dependent protein kinase G. Current Research in Physiology 5:171-178. Her scholarship is cited over 780 times.