Graduate Research Faculty

Faculty Name Research Interests
Cory Abate–Shen Understanding the relationship between the processes that control normal development and those that lead to cancer
Swarnali Acharyya Exploring mechanisms of drug resistance and cancer metastasis, with primary focus on metastatic breast cancer and lung cancer
Osama Al Dalahmah Understanding glial pathology in central nervous system (CNS) diseases.
Edmund Au Mechanisms of cortical interneuron circuit assembly and interneuron dysfunction in mental illness
Dritan Agalliu Signaling pathways and molecular mechanisms of CNS angiogenesis and blood-brain barrier formation in the developing CNS.
Cell biological mechanisms of blood-brain barrier disruption in CNS pathologies.
Rando Allikmets Stargardt macular dystrophy and other retinal diseases
Ottavio Arrancio Mechanisms underlying changes of synaptic function associated with cognitive impairment
Richard Baer The pathogenesis of hereditary breast cancer
Jonathan Barasch Developmental and cell biology of kidney organogenesis
Francesca Bartolini The role of microtubule stability and its regulation in neurodegenerative disease
Elizabeth Bradshaw Understanding the role of the human innate immune system in complex neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD)
Julie C. Canman Molecular mechanisms of cell division
Peter D. Canoll Mechanisms of glioma growth and invasion
Christine Chio Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) that represents the third leading cause of cancer death in the United States
Eunhee Choi The mutual regulation between cell division and metabolism, and its impact on physiology
Piero Dalerba Application of single-cell technologies for the analysis of tissue cell composition. Identification and clinical
development of novel predictive biomarkers to guide therapeutic algorithm design in human colon and breast cancer
Riccardo Dalla-Favera Molecular genetics of cancer; molecular pathogenesis of lymphoma and leukemia
Patricia Ducy Endocrine crosstalks between the skeleton, the brain and the pancreas
Dieter Egli The generation of therapeutically relevant cells for diabetes
Wassim Elyaman Understanding (1) how T cells are recruited to the CNS of neurodegenerative diseases, (2) what antigens are being presented to these T cells by CNS-resident innate immune cells, microglia, (3) how microglia-T cell axis regulates the disease pathogenesis, and lastly (4) what is the influence of genetic risk variants associated with these diseases on antigen-specific immune responses.
Qing R. Fan Structural biology; cell surface receptor-ligand recognition
Kevin Gardner Epigenetic regulation in breast cancer
Jean Gautier Understanding the molecular mechanisms responsible for the maintenance of genome stability
Amin Ghabrial Regulation of tube morphogenesis using novel optogenetic tools, as well as the further elaboration of the CCM3/GckIII pathway.
Lloyd A. Greene Molecular mechanisms governing neuronal differentiation and survival
Wei Gu P53 in tumor suppression and aging
Gregg G. Gundersen The regulation and function of the microtubule cytoskeleton
Rebecca A. Haeusler Understanding the development of pro-atherogenic metabolic abnormalities in the natural history of
diabetes and the metabolic syndrome
Gunnar Hargus 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 The physiological role of intra-axonal protein synthesis
Eldad A. Hod Translational research focusing on the effect of modulating iron status on innate immune mechanisms
Krystalyn Hudson The immune response to red blood cells (RBCs).
Syed Abid Hussaini Understanding the neural correlates of cognitive dysfunction by studying regions of the brain that are most vulnerable to aging and disease
Minah Kim Cancer biology and treatment; Immunotherapy; Vascular biology
Tae-Wan Kim Presenilin biology and molecular mechanism of Alzheimer's disease
Stavroula Kousteni Molecular studies of skeletal physiology
Ronald Liem The neuronal cytoskeleton and its involvement in neurodegenerative diseases
W. Ian Lipkin Immunopathogenesis and infectious diseases
Carol A. Mason Molecular mechanisms of axon guidance and synaptogenesis
Cathy Mendelsohn Molecular pathways controlling development of urogenital tract
Vilas Menon Researching the dysregulation of cell types and cell type interactions in neurodegenerative disease, using network-based modeling of transcriptomic data
George Z. Mentis Developmental organization of motor neuronal circuitry
Spinal Muscular Atrophy
Jaewon Min 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 Motor neuron disease - spinal muscular atrophy as a paradigm
Siddharta Mukherjee Understanding malignant and pre-malignant blood diseases such as Myelodysplastic
Syndrome (MDS) and Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (AML)
Natura Myeku  Understanding the mechanism of deficient protein quality control in tauopathy disorders that have a common feature - accumulation of pathological tau.
Kenneth P. Olive Preclinical therapeutics in genetically engineered mouse models of pancreatic cancer
David M. Owens The contributions of stem cells and differentiated cells to epidermal cancer
Teresa M. Palomero Vazquez Elucidation of the genetic and molecular bases of T-cell leukemia and lymphoma, with special interest in the development of targeted therapies for the treatment of these aggressive hematologic tumors
Utpal Pajvani 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)
Laura Pasqualucci 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 RNA Biology and Motor Neuron Pathology
Yueqing Peng  Epilepsy/Psychiatric Disorders; Neurobiology of Sleep; Sensory Physiology; Systems and Circutis
Liza A. Pon Cytosketetal control of organelle movements and segregation during cell division
Serge Przedbrodski Toxin-induced damage to neurotransmitter systems pertinent to movement disorders
Li Qiang Posttranslational modifications (PTMs) of transcription factors in the pathophysiology of diabetes and obesity, and their associated comorbidities,
including hepatic steatosis, cancer and cardiovascular diseases
Jianwen Que Molecular and cellular mechanisms controlling proliferation and differentiation of stem/progenitor cells
Kapil Ramachandran Our laboratory seeks a complete understanding of a fundamental and novel mechanism of neuronal protein homeostasis which is co-opted into a new form of neuromodulation.
Markus D. Siegelin Targeting apoptosis in glioblastoma;
Identification of novel drug combination therapies for glioblastoma
Janet Sparrow Cell biology of retinal disorders
Steven Spitalnik The biology of red blood cells
Andrew Sproul  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.
Ira Tabas Cellular and molecular processes related to arterial wall biology and atherogenesis
Alison Taylor Understanding the role of aneuploidy in tumor development
Andrew F. Teich Synaptic dysfunction in neurodegenerative disease, with an emphasis on Alzheimer's disease
Carol Troy The study of the molecular mechanisms of neuronal death with an emphasis on the regulation of caspase activity
Stephen Tsang CRISPR Genome Surgery and Metabolome Engineering in Patient-specific Stem Cells
Richard Vallee Microtubule motor proteins in axonal transport, brain developmental disease, and synaptic function
Clarissa Waites Roles of protein ubiquitination in synaptic function and neurodegeneration
Harris Wang Understanding the key principles that drive the formation, maintenance, and evolution of genomes within and across microbial populations
Stuart Weisberg How anatomy and organ microenvironment specify immune cell phenotype and function in health and disease. 
Hynek Wichterle The use of stem cells to study the development and function of the nervous system
Robert Winchester Autoimmunity and autoimmune disease
Howard J. Worman The studies of the inner nuclear membrane and its proteins
Ai Yamamoto Protein trafficking in Huntington’s disease and other neurological disorders
Darrell Yamashiro The role of angiogenesis in promoting the growth and metastasis of pediatric solid tumors
Hee Won Yang Understanding the signaling processes that underlie the decision to proliferate
Andrew Yates The evolution of immune repertoires throughout an individual's lifespan, and their recovery in HIV-infected individuals following antiretroviral therapy.
Lori Zeltser Developing Circuits Regulating Food Intake and Body Weight
Shan Zha The molecular mechanisms of DNA damage response and their roles in lymphocyte gene-rearrangement
Xin Zhang Investigating the mechanism of cell signaling during eye development
Zhiguo Zhang Epigenetic inheritance and cancer epigenetics