Kelly Tennant

Dr. Kelly Tennant is a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research funded post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Craig Brown’s lab at the University of Victoria. Her current research interests include behavioral assessment in mouse models of stroke, functional plasticity of blood vessels and neurons both in the intact brain and the stroke-affected brain, and the role of comorbid conditions on recovery of function.

Tennant earned her PhD in neuroscience from the University of Texas (Austin) where she was a recipient of a National Institutes of Health pre-doctoral award. Her dissertation work focused on how aging affects the ability to learn new motor skills or re-learn those skills after a stroke and how motor skill learning changes functional movement representations in the motor cortex.

Her current work utilizes in-vivo two-photon imaging combined with behavioural measures of forelimb function to determine how changes in neurons and vasculture contribute to poor post-stroke recovery in diabetic mice.

Recent Publications

Tennant KA, Adkins DL, Scalco MD, Donlan NA, Asay AL, Thomas N, Kleim JA, Jones TA. Skill learning induced plasticity of motor cortical representations is time and age-dependent. Neurobiol Learn Mem. 2012 Oct;98(3):291-302. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2012.09.004. Epub 2012 Sep 23. (PubMed abstract)

Sweetnam D, Holmes A, Tennant KA, Zamani A, Walle M, Jones P, Wong C, Brown CE. Diabetes impairs cortical plasticity and functional recovery following ischemic stroke. J Neurosci. 2012 Apr 11;32(15):5132-43. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5075-11.2012. (PubMed abstract)

Tennant KA, Adkins DL, Donlan NA, Asay AL, Thomas N, Kleim JA, Jones TA. The organization of the forelimb representation of the C57BL/6 mouse motor cortex as defined by intracortical microstimulation and cytoarchitecture. Cereb Cortex. 2011 Apr;21(4):865-76. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhq159. Epub 2010 Aug 25. (PubMed abstract)

Tennant KA, Asay AL, Allred RP, Ozburn AR, Kleim JA, Jones TA. The vermicelli and capellini handling tests: simple quantitative measures of dexterous forepaw function in rats and mice. J Vis Exp. 2010 Jul 21;(41). pii: 2076. doi: 10.3791/2076. (PubMed abstract)

Tennant KA, Jones TA. Sensorimotor behavioral effects of endothelin-1 induced small cortical infarcts in C57BL/6 mice. J Neurosci Methods. 2009 Jun 30;181(1):18-26. doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2009.04.009. Epub 2009 Apr 19. (PubMed abstract)