Graduate Research Faculty
Cory Abate-Shen, PhD
Research Interests: Molecular mechanisms of cancer development, Genitourinary cancer development
Swarnali Acharyya, PhD
Research Interests: Exploring mechanisms of drug resistance and cancer metastasis, with primary focus on metastatic breast cancer and lung cancer
Osama Al Dalahmah, MD, PhD
Research Interests: Understanding glial pathology in central nervous system (CNS) diseases
Dritan Agalliu, PhD
Research Interests: Dynamic Imaging of the CNS Vasculature, CNS and Retina Vascular Biology , Blood-Brain Barrier Biology, Neuroimmunology, Models of Psychiatric Disorders
Rando Allikmets, PhD
Research Interests: Genetic studies of Mendelian and complex eye diseases (Stargardt macular dystrophy and more); Microarray-based, next generation sequencing-based diagnostic applications for eye diseases; Gene- and small molecule therapy for retinal disorders
Ottavio Arancio, MD, PhD
Research Interests: Synapses and Circuits, Biophysics/Ion Channels, Neural Degeneration and Repair, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Neurobiology of Disease
Edmund Au, PhD
Research Interests: Cell Lineage Specification; Neuronal Migration; Synaptic Specificity; Models of Psychiatric Illness
Richard Baer, PhD
Research Interests: The pathogenesis of hereditary breast cancer
Jonathan Barasch, MD, PhD
Research Interests: Discovering the mechanisms that produce the epithelial phenotype during the conversion of mesenchymal cells
Francesca Bartolini, PhD
Research Interests: Molecular and cellular biology of neurodegeneration; the regulation and functioin of the microtubule cytoskeleton at synapse
Julie Canman, PhD
Research Interests: Molecular regulation of cell division and mechanisms of diversity during cytokinesis
Peter Canoll, MD, PhD
Research Interests: Mechanisms of glioma growth and invasion
Eunhee Choi, PhD
Research Interests: The mutual regulation between cell division and metabolism, and its impact on physiology
Riccardo Dalla-Favera, MD
Research Interests: Molecular genetics of cancer; molecular pathogenesis of lymphoma and leukemia; genetic control in lymphoid tissue development
Patricia Ducy, PhD
Research interest: Endocrine crosstalks between the skeleton, the brain and the pancreas
Qing Fan, PhD
Research Interests: Structural biology, Cell surface receptor - ligand recognition
Kevin Gardner, MD, PhD
Research Interests: Epigenetic regulation in breast cancer
Lloyd Greene, PhD
Research Interests: Cell Specification and Differentiation; Neural Degeneration and Repair; Synapses and Circuits; Treatment of Brain Tumors
Wei Gu, PhD
Research Interests: P53 in tumor suppression and aging
Gregg Gundersen, PhD
Research Interests: The regulation and function of the microtubule cytoskeleton
Rebecca Haeusler, PhD
Research Interests: Understand the development of pro-atherogenic metabolic abnormalities in the natural history of diabetes and the metabolic syndrome
Gunnar Hargus, MD, PhD
Research Interests: Pluripotent stem cells and their application in developmental biology and in modeling of neurodegenerative diseases with a special focus on frontotemporal dementia (FTD)
Ulrich Hengst, PhD
Research Interests: Cellular/Molecular/Developmental Neuroscience; Neural Degeneration and Repair; Axon Pathfinding and Synaptogenesis
Eldad Hod, MD
Research Interests: Using in vitro systems, mouse models, and human studies to investigate important problems relating to red blood cell transfusion and iron biology, particularly related to refrigerated storage, iron deficiency, hemolytic transfusion reactions, red blood cell senescence, and phagocytosis
Krystalyn Hudson, PhD
Research Interests: Immune response to red blood cells
Syed Abid Hussaini, PhD
Research Interests: Aging and Dementia; Alzheimer's disease; Cognitive disorders; Sleep-related memory loss; Spatial memory
Minah Kim, PhD
Research Interests: Cancer Biology; Vascular Biology; Immunotherapy
Tae-Wan Kim, PhD
Research Interests: Neurogenetics; Neural Degeneration and Repair; Alzheimer’s disease
Ronald Liem, PhD
Research Interests: Neural Degeneration and Repair, Cellular/Molecular/Developmental Neuroscience
Ian Lipkin, MD
Research Interests: Chronic disease; Immunopathogenesis and infectious diseases; Infectious diseases
Carol Mason, PhD
Research Interests: Synapses and Circuits; Axon Pathfinding and Synaptogenesis; Cell Specification and Differentiation; Cellular/Molecular/Developmental Neuroscience
Cathy Mendelsohn, PhD
Research Interests: Molecular pathways controlling development of urogenital tract
George Mentis, PhD
Research Interests: Neural Degeneration and Repair; Sensory Physiology; Synapses and Circuits; Motor Systems
Jaewon Min, PhD
Research Interests: Deciphering the cellular and molecular phenomena that occur in cancer to facilitate the development of new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer
Umrao Monani, PhD
Research Interests: Pediatric Neurology; Neurobiology of Disease; Motor Neuron Disease; Synapses and Circuits
Natura Myeku, PhD
Research Interests: Alzheimer’s and other Dementia Diseases; Translational Neuroscience; Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience; Synaptic Biology
David Owens, PhD
Research Interests: The contributions of stem cells and differentiated cells to epidermal cancer
Teresa Palomero Vazquez, PhD
Research Interests: The genetics and mechanisms of transformation in Peripheral T-cell Lymphoma (PTCL), a heterogenous group of mature T-cell malignancies
Laura Pasqualucci, MD
Research Interests: Elucidating the genetic basis of mature B cell malignancies, with emphasis on the two most common subtypes, diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL) and follicular lymphoma (FL)
Livio Pellizzoni, PhD
Research Interests: Cellular/Molecular/Developmental Neuroscience; Neurodegeneration and repair; RNA-binding proteins and non-coding RNA regulatory networks in neurological disorders; Synapses and Circuits
Yueqing Peng, PhD
Research Interests: Epilepsy/Psychiatric Disorders; Learning and Memory; Neurobiology of Sleep; Systems and Circutis
Liza Pon, PhD
Research Interests: Cytosketetal control of organelle movements and segregation during cell division
Serge Przedborski, MD, PhD
Research Interests: Neurodegeneration, Neurobiology of Disease, Molecular and Cellular Biology of Neurodegeneration , Parkinson's Disease, Motor Neuron Biology and Diseases, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Mitochondria Biology and Disease, Mitophagy, Neuroinflammation, Microglia, Astrocytes, Apoptosis, Necroptosis, Bioinfomatics, High-throughput Screening, Stem Cell Biology, Neural Degeneration and Repair, Motor Systems
Markus Siegelin, MD
Research Interests: Establishing Mechanisms of Drug Resistance in Brain Tumors; Identification of Novel Drug Combination Therapies for Brain Tumors; Targeting Cell Death Mechanisms in Brain Tumors; Targeting Tumor Cell Metabolism and The Epigenome for Brain Tumor Therapy
Janet Sparrow, PhD
Research Interests: Understanding the composition of RPE bisretinoid lipofuscin and conditions modulating its formation; Investigating links between RPE lipofuscin and drusen formation in age-related macular degeneration; Development of therapies to limit RPE lipofuscin formation; Interpretation of patterns of fundus autofluorescence in retinal disorders; Quantitation of fundus autofluorescence intensities
Steven Spitalnik, MD
Research Interests: The biology of red blood cells
Andrew Sproul, PhD
Research Interests: Modeling the complexities of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) by using CRISPR-mediated genome-editing to introduce specific causal and risk mutations into human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), thus allowing more robust cross comparisons between genotypes and the creation of allelic libraries in similar genetic backgrounds
Brent Stockwell
Research Interests: My laboratory studies ferroptosis, a form of cell death my lab discovered in 2012, as well as other molecular processes related to metabolism, cancer biology, and neurodegeneration.
Ira Tabas, PhD
Research Interests: Cellular and molecular processes related to arterial wall biology and atherogenesis
Alison Taylor, PhD
Research Interests: Understanding the role of aneuploidy in tumor development
Andrew Teich, MD
Research Interests: Our laboratory uses human brain tissue specimens and human cell-derived model systems to study the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and identify viable therapeutic targets
Carol Troy, MD, PhD
Research Interests: Intellectual Disabilities; Neural Degeneration and Repair; Neurobiology of Disease; Regulation of the neurovascular unit
Stephen Tsang, MD, PhD
Research Interests: Neural Degeneration and Repair; Stem Cell Biology; Sensory Physiology; Genome Surgery; Gene Therapy
Clarissa Waites, PhD
Research Interests: Understand nervous system function and dysfunction at the cellular and molecular level, focusing on pathways that regulate protein trafficking, degradation, and secretion
Harris Wang, PhD
Research Interests: Principles that drive the formation, maintenance, and evolution of genomes within and across microbial populations
Stuart Weisberg, MD, PhD
Research Interests: How anatomy and organ microenvironment specify immune cell phenotype and function in health and disease
Hynek Wichterle, PhD
Research Interests: Neural Degeneration and Repair; Cell Specification and Differentiation; Stem Cell Biology; Cellular/Molecular/Developmental Neuroscience
Robert Winchester, MD
Research Interests: Autoimmunity and autoimmune disease
Howard Worman, MD
Research Interests: How mutations in genes encoding proteins of inner nuclear membrane cause inherited diseases; Liver diseases, including fatty liver disease and autoimmune liver diseases
Ai Yamamoto, PhD
Research Interests: Roles of macroautophagy in the healthy and diseased CNS; Neural Degeneration and Repair; Disease; Protein trafficking
Darrell Yamashiro, MD, PhD
Research Interests: Tumor genetics and the design of innovative therapies
Hee Won Yang, PhD
Research Interests: Cancer biology; Systems biology; Cell biology; Synthetic biology
Andrew Yates, PhD
Research Interests: Integrating theoretical and computational tools with more traditional experimental approaches to study multiple aspects of lymphocyte dynamics
Lori Zeltser, PhD
Research Interests: Cellular/Molecular/Developmental Neuroscience; Sympathetic Innervation of Brown Adipose Tissue; Maternal Programming of Metabolic Disease; Models of Psychiatric Disorders (Anorexia); Circuits Regulating Food Intake and Body Weight
Shan Zha, MD, PhD
Research Interests: The molecular mechanisms of DNA damage response and their roles in lymphocyte gene-rearrangement
Xin Zhang, PhD
Research Interests: Mechanism of FGF signaling in eye development; Molecular regulatioin of cell shape; Adhesion and migration; Glial development and pathology; Neural degeneration and repair
Affiliated Faculty
Elizabeth Bradshaw, PhD
Research interest: Understanding the role of the innate immune system, including microglia, monocytes and macrophages, in complex neurodegenerative diseases
Christine Chio, PhD
Research Interests: Preclinical therapeutics in genetically engineered mouse models of pancreatic cancer, Redox biology, Cancer metabolism, Ex vivo 3D organoid platforms to study pancreatic cancer
Dietrich Egli, PhD
Research Interests: Genome stability in early development, differentiation, and reprogramming
Wassim Elyaman, PhD
Research Interests: T cell lymphocytes; Antigen-specific immune response in neurodegenerative diseases; Infectious etiology of Alzheimer’s disease; Modeling of microglia-T cell crosstalk
Jean Gautier, PhD
Research Interests: Understanding the molecular mechanisms responsible for the maintenance of genome stability
Stavroula Kousteni, PhD
Research Interests: examine the role of the stromal marrow niche in hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) fate with a particular emphasis in the development of myelodysplasia (MDS) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML)
Vilas Menon, PhD
Research Interests: researching the dysregulation of cell types and cell type interactions in neurodegenerative disease, using network-based modeling of transcriptomic data
Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, DPhil
Research Interests: The biology of blood development, in particular, malignant and pre-malignant diseases such as myelodysplasia (MDS) and acute myelogenous leukemia (AML)
Kenneth Olive, PhD
Research Interests: Preclinical therapeutics in genetically engineered mouse models of pancreatic cancer
Utpal Pajvani, MD
Research Interests: The role of developmental pathways, specifically Notch signaling, in obesity-induced metabolic disease, with emphasis on the pathophysiology of Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) and Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD)
Jianwen Que, MD, PhD
Research Interests: Molecular and cellular mechanisms controlling proliferation and differentiation of stem/progenitor cells of the foregut
Kapil Ramachandran, PhD
Research Interests: A new mechanism of protein degradation in neurons that generates a new form of neuromodulation
Zhiguo Zhang, PhD
Research Interests: Epigenetic inheritance and Cancer Epigenetics