Research In Motion

Chris Moskaluk, MD, PhD Professor and Chair, Department of Pathology

Transcript:
Well, the thing that I love about our research is that it's very translational. We use primary human cancer specimens that allowed us to identify a potential new therapeutic and to develop a couple of new diagnostic biomarkers.

My name is Chris Moskaluk. I am a professor of pathology. I perform surgical pathology diagnostics, I do cancer research, and I am the medical director of the clinical laboratories.

I think our research has already impacted human health. Our work led to a clinical trial of a novel therapeutic drug in a particular cancer type here at UVA. It was a fairly uncommon tumor, so over half the patients came from outside of the state of Virginia to come here for this trial. And we've developed a couple of the biomarkers that we're using diagnostically in cancer specimens right now.

Paola Gehrig, MD, Professor and Chair, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology

Transcript:
I love being a G1 oncologist. I've wanted to be a G1 oncologist since I was a third-year medical student. The opportunity to take care of my patients from the time of diagnosis through survivorship, and then ultimately as they transition to the next phase of life, should it come to that, really brings me great joy. It's difficult, but it's very rewarding to get to know my patients, get to know their families, and then to be able to impart that knowledge to the trainees, whether they're medical students, residents or fellows, really is is why I do what I do.

Hi, my name is Paula Gehrig. I'm a practicing G1 oncologist and the chair of the Department of Ob-Gyn here at UVA. I got here in June of 2022, and it's just been super fun and exciting to really build this department and hire a lot of really intelligent, hardworking, innovative new faculty so that we can continue to deliver the best of care to the patients that we serve here in Virginia.

My primary research interest has been endometrial cancer, and throughout my career, I've been very interested in clinical trials, be they surgical trials or novel therapeutics. Unlike many other malignancies, endometrial cancer is seeing an increase in incidence as well as mortality. We are opening a clinical trial here looking at patients who have a mutation in ARod one D and looking to see if these patients may benefit from bevacizumab or neuropathic, is a novel therapy to improve the outcomes of the patients that we serve.

Charles Chalfant PhD, Professor, Division of Hematology & Oncology, Department of Medicine

Transcript:
What I love about my research is that it's ever-changing, is that it's always a
puzzle you get to solve, and at the same time, I get to possibly help people or have something translate to the clinic that can benefit a number of patients with certain diseases.

My name is Charles Chalfant and I'm a professor of Medicine and Cell Biology here at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Here, I do basic biomedical research, examining how there are
different cellular mechanisms that are affected in disease states, and we try to take
advantage of those in order to possibly translate to the clinic.

Our current research is showing that there are particular proteins or enzymes in cells that are dysregulated in disease states, particularly in treating sepsis, this is a very difficult condition. More people die from sepsis every year than two 747s crashing every day. Also, this particular enzymes we look at that we're trying to develop these inhibitors and use ones that are already established and evolve those to where we can take them to the clinic, also will benefit certain patients with non-small cell lung cancer, as well as even enhance wound healing.

Colin Derdeyn, MD, Professor and Chair, Department of Radiology and Medical Imaging

Transcript:
Mostly what I'm involved in is large-scale clinical trials for stroke. These procedures that we do for thrombectomy, removing a clot from the brain. We have people that wake up on the table coming in, unable to speak or move, that regain those functions as soon as the blood vessels open. And the research that we've done in these trials has made that happen.

My name is Collin Derdeyn, and I'm an interventional neuroradiologist. And what I do, I'm essentially a plumber. I navigate wires and tubes through the blood vessels up into the head using X-ray guidance, and we use those to either open up a blockage, like an acute stroke, to restore blood flow to the brain, or to plug something up like an aneurysm and prevent it from bleeding again.

We are just now launching the first-ever platform trial for acute ischemic stroke for patients that come in with a blockage of a large artery in the brain. This trial will be what's called a platform trial, where we can randomize patients into multiple arms at the same time. So the same patient may get a different neuroprotective agent on their way to thrombectomy, may get general anesthesia or not, may get a carotid stent or not, may get any number of different questions.

And doing this on a platform allows us to answer all of these questions much more efficiently, quicker, and get answers that are going to directly impact how patients do a stroke.

Marc Breton, PhD, Professor, UVA School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry & Neurobehavioral Science


Transcript:
I'm a professor in the School of Medicine at the Center for Diabetes Technology. And, at the center, we try to develop new ways to leverage technology to help people with diabetes.

So I'm Mark Breton. I'm a professor in the school of medicine at the Center for Diabetes Technology. And I focus on finding new solutions that leverage technology to manage diabetes.

And so to use continuous glucose monitoring or automated insulin pump or even mathematical simulation to help patients, to help physicians make the right decision or even make the decisions for them.

The primary solution that we've brought to the field is really automated insulin delivery. It's also often referred to as artificial pancreas. What it is is an insulin pump connected to continuous glucose monitor, and with an algorithm in it that will make decision every five minutes and change the dose, if necessary. Every five minutes, taking most of the work out of the hands of the patients.

From what we hear, it's improved their glycemic. It's, improved sleep. Most definitely. and we are working on the next generation to make it even more seamless and more efficient.

Amy Mathers, MD, Associate Professor
Division of Infectious Diseases & International Health
UVA Department of Medicine

Transcript:
The thing I love the most about my research is the idea that I get to discover new things, and that allows me to see the world in a different way. For example, when we discover that drug resistant pathogens we're living in, hospital drains. It allowed me to look at drains and sinks differently, and I continue to try to problem solve as I look at drains and sinks to come up with better interventions to prevent them from getting to patients.

My name is Amy Mathers, and I am in both the Department of Medicine and the Department of Pathology and the School of Medicine. I am an infectious disease physician who focuses on antibiotic resistant bacteria. My research focuses on, how antibiotic resistance genes move between bacteria and how we detect them in the clinical micro lab, as well as how we detect them in the hospital, and try to eliminate transmission of drug resistant pathogens to and from patients.

With antibiotic resistant bacterial infections estimated to be the third leading cause of global deaths. It's going to be important to reduce the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria, as well as understand the places where antibiotic resistant bacteria are emerging. Unfortunately, there has not been a large amount of drug development or new antibiotic discovery, and therefore we're going to have to protect the antibiotics that we have so that they can be used for future generations.

Robert Dreicer, MD, Professor in the Division of Hematology & Oncology, UVA Department of Medicine

Transcript:
So as a clinician investigator, one of the, privileges I have is to take care of patients, but also at the same time, work with others to try to develop new and better therapies, for patients with difficult diseases. And one of the great pleasures is to occasionally see those therapies move onto fruition. And the patients that I care for benefit from those treatments.

I'm Doctor Rob Dreicer, I am the associate director for clinical research and the deputy director of the University of Virginia Comprehensive Cancer Center. I'm also a professor of medicine and urology at the UVA School of Medicine. I'm a urologic medical oncologist caring for patients with advanced prostate, kidney, bladder, testicular, adrenal, and penile cancers, as well as conducting clinical research in those diseases to find better and new treatments.

As a clinical investigator in patients with urologic cancers, I have the privilege of both caring for these patients as well as being involved in development of new therapies for them. So when there's a win, patients directly benefit. So it's a very straightforward development process. if things win, patients benefit.

Transcript:
What I really love is the translational work that we're doing and doing. The ability of our work can directly have impact to the public health and patient lives is essentially the driving force of my everyday activity.


I'm Jie Sun, I'm a professor in the ID division in the Department of Medicine and the Immunology Center. I direct a recipe immunology lab studying pulmonary immunity and pathology in the context of lung infection and cancer. I also mentor undergraduate and graduate student postdoc fellows, as well as a junior faculty in the lab.


Our body's immune system is very powerful in kidney viruses, cancer cells, as well as it to promote a tissue repair and a normal organ function. We try to better understand the rest of the immune system so we can develop a tools to treat lung disease. The coming many institute will greatly facilitate our mission, so we can be able to harness the power of immune system to develop a better molecular and cellular therapy for devastating lung disease, including non-COVID pulmonary fibrosis and then lung cancer.

Joanne Pinkerton, MD

Transcript:
I love providing solutions that improve women's health and quality of life. For example, if you have a woman who has an estrogen sensitive breast cancer and she can't take hormone therapy and she has these debilitating hot flashes and night sweats. I love being able to come up with non hormone therapy options that work, and it's incredibly exciting to be part of advancing the field of women's health.

I am Joann Pinkerton. I'm a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UVA Health. I am the emeritus director and past president of the Menopause Society, and I direct a large midlife division where we provide care for women 40 and above. And most importantly, I'm a clinical researcher, and I'm active in trying to find new therapies to treat hot flashes, to prevent bone loss, prevent fractures, or to treat vaginal changes.

There are 55 million menopausal women, and all women go through menopause about 80% have hot flashes, 25% of debilitating, but they cause loss of work time productivity. And my research is really looking to try to improve their quality of life and their health. Currently researching a non hormone that treats hot flushes and the top-line data just released showed an improvement in hot flashes and frequency and severity as well as sleep and mood. And it's not an estrogen. And it can be taken by women who can't or don't want to take estrogen.

Ling Qi, MD


Transcript:

As a project scientist, I'm driven by the curiosity and the thrills of discoveries. I have enjoyed the process of unlocking this, the secrecy of how protein degradation system works in physiology, and how it breaks down in disease. The other aspect I enjoy the most as a basic scientist is the is the training of the next generation. Scientists.

My name is Ling Qi. I am the Andrew Pisano District distinguished Professor in Physiology, and I also serve as a department chair for Molecular physiology and of biological physics in the laboratory. We try to understand how the protein degradation system works in health and disease. My goal is to elevate the department to new heights by creating a environment that fosters innovation and excellence in both research and education.

Our work has impact on human health in two ways. Our work can elucidate how the mechanisms, how this protein degradation system works in health and disease. The second, the most direct ways that we have identified the human patients that carry the genetic mutations in the pathways we study.

Professor of Research in Psychiatric Medicine Chester F. Carlson Professor

Lukas Tamm, PhD, Professor in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics and the Center for Membrane and Cell Physiology.


Transcript:
What I love about my research is going to the lab every day and discover new fundamental biological mechanisms on how our body works, and in particular how membranes communicate with one another in order to allow for virus entry, neurotransmitter release and hormone secretion.

I'm Lukas Tamm, and I'm a professor in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics and the Center for Membrane and Cell Physiology.

Our research is currently focused on two main areas. First, we are very interested to figure out the mechanism of higher enveloped viruses such as flu, HIV, Ebola virus and SARS and Purcell's bi membrane fusion. And the second area we study how neurotransmitters and hormones are released from neurons and secretory cells, and how this process is very highly controlled by calcium.

Our fundamental new studies on neurotransmitter release and hormone secretion will help with new basic understanding and new treatments for diseases such as epilepsy, depression and Parkinson's disease. As well as diabetes.

Mete Civelek, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering

Transcript:
Well, what I love about my research is that we follow our curiosity wherever it takes us and our research results bring me hope that one day we will be able to help patients who are living with cardiovascular disease.

My name is Mete Civelek. I'm an associate professor of biomedical Engineering and I am a resident faculty at the Center for Public Health Genomics. I'm a cardiovascular researcher and my lab aims to understand how our genetic makeup increases our risk of having a heart attack. And we do this by using both computational approaches and experimental approaches.

In the last 15 years or so, human genetic studies showed us that there are many additional untapped potential targets to prevent heart attacks. So my laboratory is studying smooth muscle cells, which make up an important part of our arteries, which is where plaques develop. And when these plaques rupture, that leads to heart attacks. So we're trying to find targets that will prevent this flat rupture.

And we hope that the Manning Biotechnology Institute will accelerate our findings into therapeutics.

Brant Isakson, professor in molecular physiology and biological physics


Transcript:

I love the discovery aspect about research. That's really what drives the work in our lab is discovery, and we work in the microcirculation. It's the business end of the blood vessels. It's where inflammation is regulated, it's where blood pressure is regulated. And there's a lot of new things that we're discovering all the time. A lot of things that we think can be used for translational aspects of discovery of new potential targets for therapeutics.

My name is Brant Isaacson, and I'm a professor in molecular physiology and biological physics. I'm also a resident faculty of the Robert and Bernard Cardiovascular Research Center, and that's where our work is focused. We're in the cardiovascular system and specifically in the microcirculation, and we take out very small blood vessels about the width of one of your hairs and try to figure out how they dilate and how they constrict.

We use other imaging techniques to look at how lipids are taken up and how inflammatory cells enter the tissue.

Because of the collaborative environment here at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. We've been able to work closely with physicians to test some of our ideas and some of our targets that we've discovered on human samples and see if this could be a way that we could modulate blood pressure.

Ahmad Jomaa, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics at UVA School of Medicine

Transcript:
They look at the eye of a student coming to me with a result from an experiment they run the day before, Just for me is fascinating and makes me very excited. Coming to work every day.

My name is Ahmad Jamal and I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics at UVA School of Medicine.

My lab is interested in understanding mitochondrial protestations and mitochondria. Being a signaling hub in the cell are imports. Almost 99% of its proteins to perform its function.

The mitochondria is a cell stress sensor. It can sense stress at different stages of their cell cycle, and we're interested in that because that happens quite a lot in diseases, particularly in some neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease, but also can happen in a lot of types of cancer and in tumor micro environments where the cancer cell tend to eat up basically a lot of the nutrients around it and starve itself.

So a lot of cancer cells become dormant and this is usually sensed by the mitochondria where a lot of processes are shut down in the cell. So we're trying to understand this process because when these cells become dormant, they simply escape drug treatment. And that's something we want to understand a bit better.

Jamieson Bourque, professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine and the medical director of nuclear Cardiology

Transcript:
So I love research. I love the ability to examine the new frontiers in our understanding of heart disease and gather data and make and link new connections to improve the care of our patients with heart disease.

I'm Jamie Bourque. I'm a professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine and the medical director of nuclear Cardiology. Echo choreography in the stress lab.

So my research is focused on patients who have unexplained chest pain. They often have significantly reduced functional status and uncomfortable symptoms, and we are looking at ways to use exercise and other novel therapies to help diagnose these patients so they understand why they're having chest pain and how to manage their symptoms and improve their functional status.

So we're using exercise stress testing to diagnose the cause of chest pain in patients and then we're using high intensity exercise on a treadmill, along with other novel therapies, to help improve symptoms and functional status in our heart disease patients.

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Wendy Lynch, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neural Behavioral sciences.

Transcript:
I love that every day is new, different from the last and that I have. I am continuously learning new information and acquiring new skills, new technologies. I love addressing research questions related to addiction, looking at how the brain changes once addiction has developed.

My name is Wendy Lynch and I'm an associate professor of psychiatry and neural behavioral sciences here at UVA, and I study addiction.

I study the neurobiology of addiction. So looking at how the brain changes once addiction has developed, I use preclinical models to look at these changes in the brains, and I include both males and females in my studies so that I can look at the sex differences not only with the behavior and how the addiction process develops, but also what the underlying brain changes.

The ultimate goal for the work in my lab is to discover new interventions that can be used to treat substance use disorders in humans. So we screen various interventions, environmental interventions such as exercise and neuro modulatory tools such as focused ultrasound. And these things. Can we use them to target and repair circuits that are disrupted by addiction? With the ultimate goal of helping men and women with addiction.

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Hongji Zhang, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Surgery

Transcript:
The most inspiring aspect of my research is the potential to make a tangible impact on people's lives. Witnessing the transformation of scientific discoveries into practical applications that directly benefit individuals is truly motivating.

My name is Hongji Zhang, I am an assistant professor in the department of surgery at University of Virginia School of Medicine. As a cancer immunologist, my overarching research direction revolves around the understanding of the role of the tumor microenvironment in various oncologic disease processes, such as colorectal cancer, and liver cancer, and providing novel strategy for prevention and cure, especially the role of inflammatory responses with different treatments, such as immune therapy.


In a series of studies that, my lab signified a novel approach to targeting the tumor microenvironment alone or in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors in advanced colorectal cancer. And as a junior faculty, with the support by UVA School of medicine, especially Manning Institute for Biotechnology, is pivotal in this journey. The Institute's unwavering support positions our research at the forefront of cutting-edge medicine such as cellular and genomic therapies, enabling us to accelerate discoveries and translate them into real-world applications faster.

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Michael E Williams, MD
Professor, Department of Medicine
Transcript:
I'm a clinical investigator in the University of Virginia Comprehensive Cancer Center, and I'm so grateful and excited to be involved in a field where there's been such dramatic progress in treatment options and cures for so many patients with cancer and blood disease.

I'm Dr. Michael Williams. I'm a professor of medicine in the hematology oncology division and associate director for clinical affairs in the UVA, comprehends of Cancer Center.
My work is focused in lymphoma, specifically understanding the molecular underpinnings that drive these cancers and also employing and testing in clinical research, novel targeted agents and immunotherapies that are improving survival and cure while minimizing the traditional use of chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

Lymphoma therapy has really evolved rapidly in recent years so that we are no longer using nearly as much traditional chemotherapy. Instead, we're using targeted drugs which block a key pathway that the tumor cells depend upon, and also to use immunotherapeutics, which are engineered to activate a patient's own immune system or to deliver immunologic effect that destroys the tumor cells.

We can do this because we have such robust collaborators in the UVA Cancer Center laboratories and coming soon in the new Manning Institute.

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Sarah Ewald, PhD


Transcript:
When we make a discovery, oftentimes we're the first people that know that that aspect of biology exists. By working with other researchers and clinicians, we get a chance to put those pieces of the puzzle together,

and that's how we really start to develop new ideas for therapeutics or ways to treat infection and disease. My name is Sarah Ewald.

I am an associate professor of microbiology. microbiology, immunology, and cancer biology. And my lab is really interested in understanding how we fight infections. When you're infected, your body can produce up to a softball worth of cells a day.

And the role of those cells is specifically to identify microorganisms and to clear them from your body. Unfortunately, a side effect of generating that immune response is the feeling of sickness.

We're starting to understand that as we age, a lot of the health problems we encounter are due to an inappropriate activation of an immune response. One aspect of my lab is interested in developing new technologies that allow us to study the immune response in a tissue at a biopsy scale.

In this way, we can add molecular handles to proteins in those tissues, which allow us to understand which ones are causing disease, long before the disease has progressed. And that gives us an opportunity to intervene in a timeframe when we can fully reverse those processes.

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Transcript:
Discovering how things work never gets old. I'm still excited about my research after 30 years. It's particularly true when it involves the human brain, the most complex and fascinating organ in our body. Only by gaining a better understanding of how we interact with the world, with each other, how we form emotions and memories and the narrative, if you will, will we be able to better understand Alzheimer's disease and depression?


I'm Harrison Taimur and I'm a neuroscientist. I'm also the chair of Neuroscience at the UVA School of Medicine. I study glial cells called astrocytes, the brain support cells that provide nourishment to neurons that regulate blood flow in the brain and help to form a protective barrier that prevents pathogens and toxic molecules from entering the brain.


For the longest time, the glial contribution to injury and disease has been overlooked and understudied. I firmly believe that work of our laboratory and many others will change that, that we will be able to develop glial targeted drugs to attenuate the inflammation that occurs in the context of Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy or acute brain injury.

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Chuanxi Cai, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Surgery

Transcript:
Right now I still clearly remember the exciting moment when I first discovered the function of MG53 as a membrane repair molecule. We call this magic molecule because it can release from the muscle to the blood. It can find where our body got injured and go there to be repaired. And our recent study also showed that MG53 can suppress the tumor growth via its nuclear action.

My name is Chuanxi Cai. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Surgery, the new Division of Surgical Science. The research in my lab is mainly focused on the biology of MG53 as a regenerative medicine and efficiently plays the important role in tissue repair and inflammation, as well as functioning as a tumor suppressor.

Right now, we're testing MG53 as amyokine to protect our body from acute injury against virus infection, or suppress cancer cell growth. So with the support of from UVA and other funding agency, we expect to translate our new discovery into future regenerative medicine, so that patients can recover faster after injury, and we can slow down the tumor growth for cancer patients.

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transcript:
I love what I do because it's all about discovery. So there's nothing to me that's more enjoyable than finding out new facts about how cells work that we didn't know before. So many times in my career, we've stumbled upon things that nobody previously knew, and that for me is the exhilarating part of it.

My name is Eric Hendrickson. I'm a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology, and my laboratory works on mammalian DNA double strand break repair, which is related to a variety of human disorders. Aging cancer, immune deficiencies.

Our research is related to human health because DNA repair is intimately involved in a large number of human disorders from the dysregulation of your immune system to aging phenotypes to cancer predisposition. And my lab tries to understand the basic processes of repair that are dysregulated in those diseases. And then at the same time, you can use DNA repair or in personalized medicine to go in and correct some of those mistakes in patients and cure them of their disease, and that is personalized medicine or gene editing.

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Jeff Martens, PhD
Professor, Department of Pharmacology and Senior Associate Dean of Research in the School of Medicine

Transcript:
So what excites me most about science is the process of discovery and the hope that it brings for improving human health.

My name is Jeff Martens and I'm a professor of pharmacology and also senior associate dean of research in the School of Medicine. My laboratory studies olfaction, which is our sense of smell. Specifically, we're interested in a unique population of neurons in the nose that connect to our brain, but are also unique in that they're exposed to the external environment.

Now, these neurons are necessary for our ability to detect chemicals in the air when we breathe in, when these neurons don't function properly. We are unable to smell.

Unfortunately, there are no curative therapies for olfactory loss. My laboratory has championed the use of gene therapy to provide hope to those patients who can't smell. So gene therapy means taking a lost gene or a defective gene and replacing it with a normal, healthy copy into these olfactory neurons. The Manny Institute, catalyzed by a gift from Paul and Diane Manning, is going to be a state of the art center to bring together novel biological therapies.

This will help our research by bringing together not only the expertise but also the technologies into a single location that will help to move our discoveries made at the bench to the bedside to better patients.

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What I love about my research is that it's at the intersection of basic science discovery and clinically impactful research. So what I do is called translational research. That means the ultimate goal is to translate our insights in the lab into therapeutics that are meaningful and translational be relevant for patients. My name is Kristen Anderson and I'm an assistant professor in the Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology Department, and I'm jointly appointed in obstetrics and gynecology.

My research is focused on modifying immune cells, specifically T cells, to recognize and kill cancer more effectively. Solid tumors like ovarian and pancreatic cancer present additional obstacles that we need to overcome for this therapy to work. So what my group does is we identify those obstacles and then we come up with creative engineering approaches to overcome them and translate that into a therapeutic for the clinic.

The goal is to bring the tools we build in the lab into the clinic for patients. The Manning Institute for Biotechnology is going to support this kind of research extensively. It's going to provide us with access to new technologies and state of the art equipment colleagues and collaborators with diverse expertise. So we can do interdisciplinary studies. And biotechnology and pharmaceutical colleagues who can help us rapidly translate our tools into the clinic.

Ultimately, we're going to be surrounded by colleagues with the same shared goal bringing immunotherapies to UVA patients as well as all around the globe.

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Transcript:
It is fascinating how clinical question can survive the direction of my research. For instance, many people suffer from back pain on the leg pain, understanding why they experience pain and how to treat it is at the core of my research.

I'm Joshua Lee, the professor in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery and Biomedical Engineering. In my clinical role, I serve as a director of the Spine Fellowship program, where I do surgery to help patients. I also the director of the Spine Research. Our work is generously supported by multiple grant.

Our research holds great promise for improving human health in our lab. We are pioneering targeted therapy to trade discrimination through a simple preference injection. If successful, this innovation could revolutionize our car to treatment for disc herniation. The coming Manning Institute will bring my research to another much higher level. I hope with his help we can translate our bench side research to clinical practice.

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George Christ, PhD
Professor, Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Orthopedic Surgery


Transcript:
I do what you would refer to as translational research. That means everything from basic science to clinical applications. And for me personally, that means every single day I'm doing something different, learning something new. And the group of people that you have to assemble to do that is diverse, incredibly talented, brilliant and dedicated and committed in many different ways.

I'm George Christ, professor of biomedical engineering and orthopedic surgery at the University of Virginia, where I hold the Commonwealth Chair in engineering. I run the laboratory for Regenerative Therapeutics, and we're a diverse group of interdisciplinary researchers dedicated to developing regenerative medicine and tissue engineering technologies to treat craniofacial and extremity trauma. Our wounded warriors. And this work is funded by the National Institutes of Health, as well as primarily the Department of Defense and Industry stakeholders.

Because any time you're doing translational research and trying to get things into the clinic, giving a diverse funding portfolio, our work is focusing on creating replacement tissues and organs for those in need and primarily for wounded warriors with head, neck and extremity trauma injuries. But this is where the Manning Institute has an enormous potential to be impactful because the GMP state of the art GMP facilities there could provide a place where we could create replacement tissues and organs right on the campus here at UVA to serve not only our wounded warriors, but the civilian population as well.

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Melina Kibbe, MD
Professor, Departments of Surgery and Biomedical Engineering

Transcript:
What I love about research is the process of discovery and the fact that something that we might discover can actually improve human health. My name is Melanie Kibbe. I am a vascular surgeon and professor in the Departments of Surgery and Biomedical Engineering. Our lab focuses on developing novel drug eluting technologies.

The overall goal of our research laboratory is to develop novel drug eluting technologies for patients with vascular disease. One example is arterial stenting. So after a stent is put into an artery, let's say your coronary arteries. Those stents eventually can fail. And so we're developing a novel therapy based on a nanotechnology platform that will target a nano fiber to the area that was stunted and then release a drug to keep that artery open longer and healthier.

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Xinyu Zhou, MD
Assistant Professor, Department of Surgery

Transcript:
I'm passionate about my research because it's originates from the basic science, but also expand towards unlocking the potential of understanding the human health and diseases. The vision that my work could someday make a difference in people's health and lives is incredibly fulfilling.

Hi, I am Xinyu Zhou, a research assistant professor in the Department of Surgery. My research focuses on the role of ion channels in the calcium homeostasis in the heart, as well as a potential function of chromatin positioning and a gene regulation.

I also employ advanced microscopy and develop innovative image analysis to AIDS, myself and my colleagues. Deciphering complex visual data and also uncover the hidden insights. Our research on ion channels could provide crucial information on the cardiac and muscular physiology and also uncover the potential targets for the treatment of human diseases. The ultimate goal to offer our research is to transform the discoveries into the clinical trial, to treat off the human diseases.

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Boris Kovatchev, PhD, Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences

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Ed Egelman, PhD, Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics

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Well, I love my research because it continues to be incredibly exciting since I was a graduate student in the last century. We've developed many new techniques and instrumentation that allow us to do things now that we simply couldn't have imagined even five or ten years ago. I'm Eric Lowman Harrison, distinguished professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics.

My laboratory is focused on structural biology, and the main technique we use is cryo electron microscopy, which enables us to determine the atomic structure of many biological assemblies. These cover of the range from pathogenic bacteria that infect humans to archaea that live in the boiling acid.

So we are involved in very basic scientific and biological research, and the applications may not always be clear. Many times those applications emerge ten, 20 or 30 years in the future. But for example, one of the things we work on is how pathologic all bacteria attach to human cells using things called pili. And by understanding the structure of these appendages or filaments, we'll be able to develop therapies that can prevent their infection.

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Mariano Garcia Blanco, MD, PhD, Professor, Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology


Lately in society, we've been challenged by an RNA virus and we've solved the problem with an RNA vaccine and among RNA biologists. So what a better time to be an RNA biologist than right now. Love what I do and I love coming to work every morning and it is exciting to be able to do discoveries and also to apply them.


I'm Mariano Garcia Blanco. I am a professor and chair of Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology here at University of Virginia. My laboratory works on two areas of RNA biology, both very important for human health. The first area is RNA viruses. The second area is autoimmune diseases and the RNA virus site of the lab. We've done work that identifies targets for new antivirals and that gives new ideas for vaccines against these viruses and the autoimmune disease side of it, we discover a completely novel pathway that we believe could be the target for new therapeutics that would be much better than what we currently have.


We believe these are all RNA based therapies that these can be a terrific addition to the Manning Institute of Biotechnology.

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Todd Bauer, MD
Professor, Division of Surgical Oncology, Department of Surgery


Transcript:
What I love most about my research is that we're able to look to the clinic where we're treating cancer patients and identify our biggest challenges, and then go to the research laboratory, design experiments to understand and overcome those challenges.
The two biggest challenges we face are first, cancer metastasis, which is spread of cancer cells to other parts of the body and the second challenge is the resistance of cancer to chemotherapy.

My name is Todd Bauer. I am a surgical oncologist and chief of the Division of Surgical Oncology, and I'm also a physician scientist. I perform surgery for patients with cancer of the pancreas, liver, and other organs. In addition, I lead a research laboratory that studies pancreatic cancer and colorectal cancer.

By developing newer, more effective treatments for pancreatic cancer and colorectal cancer, we will improve survival and quality of life for our patients. We are passionate about our research and we're able to share with our patients the hope and optimism that we are making progress towards more
effective treatments and a greater chance for cure in the future.

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Huiwang Ai, PhD
Professor, Department of Molecular Physiology & Biological Physics


Transcript:
I am excited that our work can contribute to not only the understanding of chemistry and biology in lives, but also to the development of a new therapy and procedures that can help patients.

My name is Huiwang Ai. I'm a biophysicist and a chemical biologist. We develop molecular bio stasis to better understand processes related to redox biology, metabolism, and neuronal activity.

At UVA, it has a very strong medical score which provides us a unique environment. As a basic scientist, we can collaborate with physicians to translate our study to help patients. For example, you know, we are applying our biosensors to understand Alzheimer’s disease, and
also help a patient to find new therapy, and you know, lifestyle changes, for example.

Meanwhile, you know, we have collaborations with physicians to apply our bio sensors to study diabetes and develop new therapy for diabetes.

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Professor, Division of Gynecologic Oncology, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology

Transcript:
I'm a clinical researcher and I love clinical research for two main reasons. The first reason is that it allows me to offer my patients novel state of the art care for their cancer. And the second reason is because the research we do today will change the future and the treatments for the patients in the future.

I'm Linda Duska and I'm a gynecologic oncologist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, and I'm also a clinical researchers studying novel therapies for gynecologic cancers.

Here at UVA, we've had clinical trial opportunities for our patients that have actually changed the way we take care of cancer moving forward. A great example is endometrial cancer, where we had two studies opened here at UVA that were just very recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine and have changed the way we take care of enemy oral cancer moving forward.

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Eric Houpt, MD
Professor, Division of Infectious Diseases & International Health, Department of Medicine

Transcript:
My group, we develop molecular diagnostic tools, which are really precise
tools that can document and detect what is the exact cause of different infections.

I'm Eric Houpt, a professor in the division of Infectious Diseases. I work in two main areas, one is on mycobacterium lung diseases, the other is in childhood infections, from fever, to tuberculosis, to diarrhea.

So the main focus of my research is to develop these
molecular tools, think of it like a magnifying glass, that can really
finely diagnose the cause of different infections. We apply this to lung diseases,
to childhood infections, diarrheal diseases.

The way I see it, if you don't know exactly what's the cause of the infection,
you don't know how to treat it.

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Antonio Abbate,, MD, PhD, Professor, Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of Medicine

Transcript:
I love the opportunity to discover,
find out why some people get
worse and some others don't,
and I would love the
opportunity to treat people
and get them better.

I'm Antonio Abbate,
I'm the Ruth C. Heede
professor of cardiology
in the Berne Cardiovascular Research Center.
I'm a cardiologist
and I see patients in
the coronary care unit
and outpatient in Fontaine
Heart and Vascular Center.
I treat patients with acute
myocardial infarction, heart failure,
as well as patients with
pericarditis, myocarditis
and I run a research program
focused on inflammation
and heart disease.

The focus of my research is inflammation
and interleukin-1, the
fever molecule
and how it can make
heart disease worse
specifically in the heart attack.
It can promote heart failure.
It can make heart failure worse,
it can cause pericarditis, myocarditis.
We run clinical
trials in patients
and interfere block interleukin-1 and other molecules
and make patients better,
heal the heart better,
recover their function
when we test them
on exercise testing.
We also work with basic
scientists who develop new drugs.

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Transcript:
I absolutely love on a daily basis being able to get into what
we call a research sandbox, an area where there's interaction between a diverse set of people with different scientific backgrounds. They include people who are clinicians, people who have expertise
in vascular biology, physiology, chemistry, even acoustic physics.

I'm Jonathan Lindner. I'm a physician scientist in cardiology, and I serve as the
vice chief for research in the cardiovascular division. I am a cardiovascular imager.

That is where my research lies in developing new ways of being able to image
the heart non-invasively. Many years ago, we developed the field of contrast ultrasound where we use these tiny micro bubbles, smaller than the blood. cells of your body, that ring in an ultrasound
field like a musical instrument. These are now used in millions of patients a year to better diagnose
heart disease. We're now creating the next generation of ultrasound contrast agents that are smart, that can hone in on disease so we can diagnose it earlier, or even micro bubbles that ring rather violently that we can deliver genes or drugs to specific tissues of the body.

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Research in Motion
Jennifer Payne, MD
Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences


Transcript:
Well, I love playing detective. I like finding out things that other people don't know that really help us try to understand the underlying biology of psychiatric illness.

I'm Jennifer Payne. I'm professor and Vice-Chair of Research in the Department of Psychiatry here at UVA, and I do research on postpartum depression and how to manage psychiatric disorders during pregnancy and during the postpartum time period. I partner with other basic scientists to try to understand the underlying biology of postpartum depression.

My research has identified two epigenetic biomarkers of postpartum depression, which are about 80% accurate in predicting who's at risk for this potentially devastating illness. With these biomarkers, we are able to identify women at risk during pregnancy before the onset of symptoms and do prevention in order to prevent the onset of mental illness. Hopefully understanding
the underlying biology of postpartum depression will help us understand
the underlying biology of psychiatric illness in general and lead to better treatments.

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Ariel Gomez, MD
Director of the Child Health Research Center, and the director of the Center of Excellence in Pediatric Nephrology.

Transcript:
The very thrill of discovery, figuring out how nature works, be, how a cell moves through a surface how it changes its identity, et cetera. And then apply that knowledge to the care of people, particularly children.

My name is Ariel Gomez. I'm the Director of the Child Health Research Center, and the director of the Center of Excellence in Pediatric Nephrology.

I try to understand how cells know who they are, and this is very relevant for understanding disease because cells change their identity when they are sick, or when they are trying to defend the organism against a disease.

When a cell doesn't know who she is, this immediately results in
the potential for disease. If we were able to revert a cell to its original state. And just think cancer,
for instance, or other diseases of the kidney and so forth. Then we may be able to solve disease by working on what we call, cell fate.

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Kevin Pelphrey, PhD Discusses Brain Development in Children
Professor, Department of Neurology


Transcript:
We get to study brain development, one of the most interesting subjects I can think of, and it allows us to understand how the developing brain allows children to do more and different things as they grow up. And we're getting more and more information about how we can optimize child development and optimize healthy brain development.

I'm Kevin Pelphrey, I'm a professor of neurology at the University of Virginia, and as a neuroscientist, I direct the University of Virginia's Autism Center of Excellence. Our research we are interested in understanding children's brain development, children with or without autism and optimizing each child's individual potential.

Those of us who work with children with autism all know is that each individual child is different and unique. And so we're taking a
precision medicine approach to our research where we utilize brain imaging techniques, genetics, observing the child's behavior, talking with them and bringing that all together using artificial intelligence, machine learning, data
analytic techniques to allow us to predict which treatment will work best for each child at their
particular stage of development.

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Research in Motion Charles Farber

Transcript:

So what's really excites me about the genetics research that we're doing here at UVA is the thrill of discovery for me. That's why I love research. Being one of the first people to discover something about the human genome that we hadn't known before. To me, that's that's super exciting.

I'm Charles Farber. I'm the director of the Center for Public Health Genomics here at UVA, and my lab focuses on the genetics of osteoporosis. The debilitating disease that increases an individual's risk of experiencing bone fractures.

So my lab here at UVA is focused on identifying specific genetic variants that influence an individual's risk of developing osteoporosis. Our hope is this information could be used both for drug development as well as developing tools in precision medicine that would allow us to identify individuals earlier in life who are at high risk for developing this debilitating disease.

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Thomas Loughran, MD
Professor, Division of Hematology & Oncology, Department of Medicine

https://med.virginia.edu/research/

Transcription:
Very excited about our research. Researchers focused on leukemia. I see patients with leukemia. Those samples from patients go back to our laboratory. The researchers focus on the fundamental properties of why the leukemia cells survive and that will lead to better treatment down the road for our patients.

My name is Tom Loughran, and I'm a Professor of Medicine and Director of the UVA Cancer Center. My job is very exciting. I do a lot of different activities. One is a physician scientist, see patients, run a laboratory. And I most importantly, I'm director of the cancer center. And that's a really strategic administrative job to make sure that we remain an NCI designated comprehensive cancer center.

Our research is really focused on patients, starting with the discovery of a rare human disease called LGL Leukemia. We explore the mechanisms or how the leukemia cells survive in the patient's body. And based on that information, we can develop new therapy for the disease. New therapy means new drugs. In our case, it's usually medicines that suppress or turn off the immune system because these patients suffer from an activated immune system.

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Coleen McNamara, MD
Professor, Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Department of Medicine

https://med.virginia.edu/research/

Transcription:
My work focuses on the role of immune cells in heart and vascular disease. It's a new field with novel discovery, and we're identifying new pathways related to heart disease every day that can be translated to help our patients.

I'm Colleen McNamara. I'm a physician scientist in the cardiovascular division in the Department of Internal Medicine and also director of the Carter Immunology Center. It's really emerged that the immune system's important in heart and vascular disease and taking those two areas together, we're able to really advance the field in novel ways that will lead to immunotherapy to prevent heart attacks and stroke.

So as director of the Carter Immunology Center and the great pleasure of working with a large group of immunology experts that are really leading their fields in understanding how the immune system impacts on infection, cancer, heart disease, lung disease and having tremendous impact on human health.

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Mitch Rosner, MD, MACP researches how your body metabolizes water. In particular, he’s focused on extreme endurance athletes. How you drink water and other electrolytes during activity can impact your performance, and he’s going to find out how.

#endurancesports
#electrolytes

Transcription:
My research focuses on salt and water metabolism in endurance athletes mostly. And what I really love about that research is that it brings physiology to the research side in studying a problem that I think is of relevance to many people.

My name is Dr. Mitchell Rosner. I'm a professor of medicine and also chair of the Department of Medicine here at the University of Virginia. My research focuses on sodium or salt and water metabolism, and I'm a kidney specialist as well.

Based upon our research findings, we've been able to develop guidelines for how people should drink water and other electrolytes during endurance activities. And in doing so, we think we've really improved the outlook for patients when they're involved in these extreme environments, doing prolonged activities.

Mitch Rosner, MD, MACP
Chair, Department of Medicine

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Li Li, MD, PhD, MPH
Chair, Department of Family Medicine

https://med.virginia.edu/research

Transcription:
So I am a family doc, but also cancer researcher. And my research really is at the intersection of population and a molecule. We try to understand how our environment work together with the genome to drive the colon cancer Carcinogenesis.

So I'm Li Li and I'm a Professor of Medicine and I in the composition and the cancer research and my research focus on the stand in the etiology, epidemiology and prevention of colon cancer.

So my research really trying to understand the disparity between black and white in terms of the risk and the survival of colon cancer. We know now the left and the right side of the colon are two different disease and also the age of onset has been getting younger, younger. So my research is trying to focus on understanding this disparity and how we can prevent this.

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John Lukens, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Neuroscience

https://med.virginia.edu/research/

Transcript:
So one of the things I like most about research in our lab
is the creative process, and in particular,
the creative process of working with students
to come up with new ideas
that will hopefully affect the lives of people.
Coming in every day to work,
I feel like I have multiple lottery tickets,
and if one of them hits, we could
make a huge difference in in terms of
helping people's lives.
I'm John Lukens. I'm an associate professor
in the Department of Neuroscience,
and also part of the Center for Brain Immunology and Glia,
and we're trying to understand how immune cells,
which are typically thought to be out in the periphery,
can actually act on the brain and contribute to disease.
For the longest time, we thought the immune system
was completely separated from the brain,
but within the last five to 10 years,
because of work that's been been done at UVA,
we now know that the immune system is a key contributor
to neurological diseases such as
Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's.
And we're trying to work on ways to
harness this immune system to treat these disorders.

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Jason Papin, PhD
Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering

https://med.virginia.edu/research/

Transcript:
We build computer models of networks inside cells.
We apply these computer models to problems in cancer,
infectious disease, and use those models to understand
of all of these different genes or proteins,
which are the most important ones for us to focus
on developing a new drug to treat this disease.
My name's Jason Papin.
I'm a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering
in the School of Medicine
and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
I teach graduate and undergraduate courses
on how we can use computer models
to solve important problems in medicine.
I also lead a research group with PhD students,
post-doctoral fellows, other scientists,
to help develop these models
and apply them to important problems in medicine.
These computer models that we develop
account for all the complexity that are in cells
in a way that would be impossible
without the computer models.
We've applied these to try to figure out
what are the right drug targets,
the right changes in the environment,
to stop cells from growing when you don't want them to,
like in cancer or infectious disease.
And we've designed different therapeutic strategies
that allow us to tackle problems in medicine
that affect many, many people.

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Maria Luisa Sequeira Lopez, MD
Professor, Division of Pediatric Nephrology, Department of Pediatrics

https://med.virginia.edu/research/

Transcript:
From the challenge of designing experiments
to make fundamental discoveries,
to the training of the next generation of scientists.
My name is Maria Luisa Sequeira Lopez.
I am a professor of pediatrics.
I'm a UVA Faculty Senator
and an associate editor for three scientific journals.
I do basic research on renal expressing cells, which are
endocrine cells in the kidney,
that maintain blood pressure homeostasis.
We studied their role in the development
of the kidney vasculature
and how they sense and respond
to small changes in blood pressure
to maintain blood pressure and overall homeostasis.
The major advances in science applying
to human health occur from basic research discoveries,
which were not originally targeted to cure diseases.
So we cannot predict the impact of the discoveries.
It is very important to do basic research,
because without that basis,
you cannot have something to apply
and translate to cure a disease,
and that is the ultimate goal
of any physician scientist, including me.

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William Petri, MD, PhD
Professor, Division of Infectious Diseases & International Health, Department of Medicine

https://med.virginia.edu/research/

Transcription:
One of the things I love about my research is this opportunity to explain to the public things that come up in infectious diseases. This most recently has been with COVID 19, where I've been writing a column of questions and answers about COVID 19, also about polio, or what's new with the flu vaccine this year. And so the ability to understand the science and then be able to explain it to the public is a very rewarding part of my profession.

My name is Bill Petri. I'm a professor of infectious diseases at UVA, and my research involves not just the Department of Medicine and our infectious disease fellows, but also graduate students in the Microbiology, immunology, Cancer Biology Department and Biochemistry, as well as in pathology.

In my lab, we study infectious diseases and how the immune system protects us from infections. And we do that in infections that are important in countries like Bangladesh as well as here in the U.S. and even at the University of Virginia Hospital. And what is so interesting about that is that the more that we learn, the more we understand about how beautifully created the immune system is to provide protection against parasites, viruses and bacteria. I think one example of the impact of what we're doing is in COVID 19, where we've discovered that an allergy drug called Dupilumab is an effective treatment for patients hospitalized with the most severe forms of COVID 19.

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Jochen Zimmer, PhD
Professor, Department of Molecular Physiology & Biological Physics

https://med.virginia.edu/research/

Transcript:
Every day I'm learning something new about a new biological process that I hadn't been aware of or we are learning about new techniques that allow us to address our questions from different angles.
My name is Jochen Zimmer. I'm a professor in the molecular physiology and biological physics department at the UVA School of Medicine, and we are using techniques from structural biology, primarily cryo-electron microscopy and x-ray crystallography to identify how nano machines that are responsible for producing these biological polymers that are deposited on the cell surface, how they're formed, how they're transported to the cell surface, and how they're assembled at the surface to actually produce unique materials. The formation of the extracellular matrix in vertebrates, in humans, correlates with many different pathological conditions. This includes autoimmune diseases, arthritis, cardiovascular diseases, as well as cancer. So forming these extracellular matrices is very critical for a healthy system, organism to function and thrive. Furthermore, if we are able to actually reconstitute or recapitulate the formation of these extracellular matrices in vitro, we can use this information to design artificial tissues which is important for therapeutic as well as diagnostic purposes.

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Allan Tsung, MD
Chair, Department of Surgery

https://med.virginia.edu/research/

Transcript:
To me. I see myself as a surgeon, as well as a scientist, as a surgeon in the hospital. I can see all the questions that are unanswered that we need to better help my patients. However, as a scientist, I'm able to study as well as come up with new knowledge to better answer these questions.

My name is Alan Tsung and I'm the chair of the Department of Surgery at the University of Virginia.
I am a cancer surgeon as well as a cancer researcher. One of my research interests is trying to figure out how I can help my patients recover faster from an operation. For me, the most important goal is to have my patients return to normal activities, be able to do the things they want to do as soon as possible. After any operation.

There has been a lot of emphasis on improving the quality and outcomes for patients undergoing surgery for their cancer. One of my research goals is to determine the role of exercise exercise before an operation and how can help with the outcomes. We have found that exercise can not only decrease the inflammation but help patients recover faster. But even more interesting exercise could actually decrease the chance of cancer coming back after any surgery.

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Shayn Peirce-Cottler, PhD
Chair, Department of Biomedical Engineering

https://med.virginia.edu/research/

Transcript:
I'm a biomedical engineer and it's the best job in the world because we get to solve problems in human health by bringing together all the tools of engineering to figure out all the complexity of biology and physiology.

I'm Shayn Peirce-Cottler. I am the chair of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia, and I study small blood vessels. I study the smallest blood vessels in our body, the capillaries, and they are responsible for feeding oxygen and nutrients to all of our cells. And when our bodies are sick, our blood vessels are sick. And if we can figure out how to keep our blood vessels healthy, we can stay healthier.

So as biomedical engineers, we develop computer models, and those computer models create the designs that the 3D printer then takes and forms using cells and gels essentially into 3D tissue structures that have blood vessels and that function, and it can deliver oxygen and nutrients. And so if we can figure out how to make this work, then we can apply it to all different types of organs and tissues where we need structures that can be implanted into the body and stay alive and keep that part of the patient healthy and functioning.

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Ukpong Eyo, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Neuroscience

https://med.virginia.edu/research/

Transcript:
My research is really fun. I study these cells called Microglia in the brain. I really love studying them because they are really animatic. We're getting to know a lot more about them, but each time we know a little bit more about them, we find out that we know a lot less.

My name is Ukpong Eyo. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience. I study microbial cells and I study them as glial cells, which are non neuronal cells in the brain.

What has become clear is that these immune cells that we study in the brain are critical regulators of the pathology of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease. Our findings suggest that these cells actually regulate the vasculature in these diseases. And we've also been able as a team to recruit one of the foremost researchers that studies the human version of these cells.

And we're going to be studying them in our context to see and enlighten us if they indeed play a role in Alzheimer's disease.

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Sana Syed, MD
Associate Professor
Division of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition
Department of Pediatrics

https://med.virginia.edu/research/

Transcript:
I think for me as a pediatrician researcher is at its very core about equity and justice. When I take care of children in my clinical practice, we see all these gaps of care, which as a researcher I can then go back and help try and find answers to so you can then create a new future and opportunities for the children that we're seeing today. My name is Sana Syed. I'm a pediatric gastroenterologist and physician scientist. I take care of children with diseases of the gut. So I really think science is about developing the next generation. I hope my career will be about mentoring and developing the next generation with a focus on women and underrepresented minorities. From a science perspective, I think it will be such a huge contribution if we, in any small way will help reduce the burden of childhood stunting and understand what causes it and how to solve it.

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