Nancy Carrasco

Nancy Carrasco is a Professor in, and the Chair of, the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at Vanderbilt University. Carrasco has conducted research in the fields of biochemistry, biophysics, molecular physiology, molecular endocrinology, and cancer.

Carrasco isolated the coding DNA for the sodium/iodide symporter NIS, the iodide transporter protein that actively pulls iodide from the bloodstream into the thyroid gland. Iodide is an essential constituent of the thyroid hormones, which are crucial for the development of the nervous system beginning in uterine life, and regulate metabolism in virtually all tissues. The critical importance of the thyroid hormones makes understanding the protein that ushers their key constituent into the thyroid gland essential to understanding human health overall.

Carrasco received her M.D. and master’s degree in biochemistry from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in her native Mexico City and completed her postdoctoral training at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology. She was on the faculty at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and then the Yale School of Medicine before Vanderbilt.