Research In Motion

Ahmad Jomaa, PhD, and Sara Zdancewicz, PhD Student
Transcript
Ahmad Jomaa:
My name is Ahmad Jomaa and I'm an assistant professor in the department of molecular physiology and biological physics, and I'm a mentor on the T32 Molecular Biophysics Training Grant.
Sara Zdancewicz: And I'm Sara. I'm a current third year in the lab of Dr. Jomaa, and I'm a recipient of the Biophysics T32. A big part of being part of the T32 training program for me is getting the opportunity to not only interact more closely with a lot of professors and mentors in the department and get more one-on-one feedback than maybe I would have gotten if I wasn’t part of the T32, but I also think it gets me to consider my project from a viewpoint that I really haven't thought about previously.
Ahmad Jomaa:
Yeah, I mean, this is very cool, because we think about studying the ribosome, how it's a machine that makes proteins and connects how you make a protein to downstream processes like targeting or processing or quality control, and we use particularly a cryo-EM in the lab, but I think the training grant forced us to think a little bit just outside that. So it's very important to think about collaborations and interdisciplinary when you're in a training program than just being in a single lab.
Sara Zdancewicz:
I think that a lot of people have put in a lot of work to make these training grants, these training programs, possible for the students here, and I think that the amount of effort and the amount of enthusiasm and engagement that you put into these training programs is what you're going to get out of it, right? I think that being able to build a training community here is really, really cool, and I think that that’s only going to be facilitated when you have students that are willing to engage, and you have people that are willing to show up to these meetings and are willing to listen to you talk about your research and ask you questions that either challenge what you’ve been doing or even simply asking for a clarification, forcing you to explain things that maybe you haven't had to talk about before.
Ahmad Jomaa:
Thinking about getting enough mentorship, check the mentors list on that training grant, see if there’s something, or someone, the research program would also complement closely what you’re studying would make definitely a great benefit to be on that training grant because you want to chat more with these mentors. Being part of a community at the training grant eventually will grow into a large cohort of students that they can talk to each other. So if you see yourself also being part of that community, I think it would be definitely a good idea to try to join this, not only for one year, but also go beyond that one year and then keep going to these seminars or lunches and then listen to other people’s projects. That definitely makes a big impact in research.
Sara Zdancewicz:
I knew I had done structural biology up until this point. I knew I wanted to expand, and I think UVA gives a really good platform to facilitate that. I think that the T32 program here gives you a little bit of a better platform with which to reach out to other professors, to talk to other people in different labs, to ask to use equipment, to ask to learn how to do different assays, and I think that's something that people can absolutely do independently. I think that we've been able to reach out to a lot of professors very easily and people always have the availability and the willingness to meet, chat with us, and then see how they can help, and I think that’s been great.

Nao Hagiwara, PhD, is a Professor of Public Health Sciences
Transcript
What I love most about my research is that it has the potential to improve the lives of people, particularly from those people from marginalized communities. Sometimes I have the chance to directly speak to participants in my studies, and in the past, some have thanked me for caring about their healthcare experiences. Those moments remind me that this research is not only personally meaningful to me, but also it has the potential to make a real difference in people's lives. My name is Nao Hagiwara. I'm a professor in the department of public health sciences. I also serve as director for PHACER, which stands for the Program on Health Disparities and Community Engagement Research. I have a training background in experimental social psychology, and my research focuses on examining how discrimination contributes to disparities in healthcare and health outcomes. My research investigates how discrimination affects people’s health through both interpersonal and intrapersonal processes. One line of research focuses on patient-provider communication, specifically how providers’ biases can shape healthcare interactions, and how provider communication skills training can improve patient outcomes. Second focuses on discrimination as a chronic stressor and tries to identify psychological strategies that protect health and well-being in the face of discrimination.

Fernando Ruiz, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Research in the Department of Pediatrics
Transcript
I love my job as a scientist because that gives me the opportunity to discover new things that can contribute to human health, and because my work also provides me with intellectual freedom, continuous learning, and the satisfaction that I can contribute to human knowledge. My name is Fernando Ruiz. I'm an associate professor of research in the department of pediatrics. My lab is interested in understanding the pathogenesis of enterobacteria such as Shigella, pathogenic E. coli, and those pathobionts associated with the inflammatory bowel disease. We study host pathogen interactions, mechanism of immunization, bacterial secretion systems that these enterobacteria uses to cause disease. My work in bacterial pathogenesis is aimed to enhance human health by uncovering the mechanisms of intestinal inflammation, intestinal pathology, immune evasion that bacteria orchestrate to cause disease. We can use this information for vaccine development, for new diagnostics, or to implement therapeutic strategies that we can use to battle infections that primarily affect children.

Michael Brown, PhD, is a Professor of Medicine
Transcript
I'm excited that I get to study the immune system and learn how the immune system protects our bodies from infection and cancer, and I'm thrilled to work with people from all over the world each and every day- incredible, brilliant, and creative individuals. My name is Michael Brown. I'm a professor in the department of medicine. My research team studies natural killer cells, or NK cells. NK cells are an essential component of white blood cells, a particular type that protects the body from infection and cancer. One focus of my research team is to study how NK cells are protecting us from lethal infections like HIV. In a recent discovery, we found that NK cells can use paired receptors to identify and ultimately kill infected targets. Our research will identify signaling pathways used by antiviral NK cells, and by identifying those signaling pathways, we can identify new targets of immunotherapy. Our hope and aim is that we can translate the science, our findings, into new immune therapies that can be used to treat patients with chronic virus infections like HIV.

Xin Li, PhD, is a Professor of Plastic Surgery, Maxillofacial, and Oral Health
Transcript
I'm fascinated by how simple metabolite, something like succinate, our cells and microbiota make all the time, can act as a signaling molecule that shapes disease. What really excites me is a loop we study. When tissues are stressed, succinate builds up, and then it feeds back to drive more inflammation. Understanding and eventually breaking this loop is what motivates me every day. I'm Xin Li, a professor in the plastic surgery, maxillofacial and oral health department at UVA. My lab studies how succinate signaling contributes to disease across different systems. We work on periodontitis, aging-related inflammation, connections between oral health and the brain, with emerging work in oral cancer pain. Along the way, we are not just studying the mechanisms, we are also developing ways to block this pathway, and we've already seen encouraging results in preclinical models. Ultimately, we want to turn these findings into real treatments. By targeting succinate signaling, we are working on new ways to treat and prevent chronic inflammatory diseases. From oral disease to neurodegeneration and cancer pain. With support from the Manning Institute for Biotechnology, we aim to move this work closer to the clinic.

Jeff Sturek, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine
Transcript
I'm a physician scientist, which means I take care of patients and I also study mechanisms of disease. So what I really love is being able to have a foot in both of those spaces. Learning what’s happening with patients, taking care of them, bringing that data back to the laboratory and trying to understand the mechanisms that are driving disease. So I'm Jeff Sturek. I'm an associate professor in pulmonary and critical care medicine, with appointments in biomedical engineering and pharmacology. I'm a physician scientist focused on inflammatory and fibrotic lung diseases. So I take care of patients with those diseases, both in the clinic and in the hospital setting. We take observations from those patients, bring them back to the laboratory and try to understand the mechanisms driving disease with a focus on the immune system. Our focus is really on a specific part of the immune system called B cells. These are the cells that make antibodies. Typically, we think about that in response to infection, but we think they're also important in the response to tissue injury. And what I'm excited about is the ability for us to really understand how these cells work and through collaborations with the Manning Institute, develop new therapies related to B cell biology for lung disease.

Jaime Mata, PhD, is a Professor of Radiology and Medical Imaging
Transcript
I love that our research with hyperpolarized xenon MRI is one of those successful cases that started with an idea and today is a proven medical technique used all over the world. Our group at UVA were the first in the world to acquire human lung images using this MRI technique. Today, this technology is FDA approved, reimbursable, and used by hospitals and research centers in North America, Europe, and Asia. It's a wonderful feeling knowing that our research is being used all over the world and can benefit millions of people. My name is Jaime Mata, and I'm a professor of radiology and medical imaging. I do research using MRI and hyperpolarized xenon gas as a new and safe contrast agent for the lungs. But why using xenon MRI? Because standard MRI probes the amount of water in the tissues, but since the lungs are filled mostly with air, with standard MRI, we cannot get a lot of information from the lungs. So if you inhale the xenon, we can see the xenon in the MRI, and we can do multiple images of the lungs with high resolution, and we can get regional information about how your lungs work. So xenon MRI is ideal to test new lung treatments and determine how treatments work in different individuals. Because it doesn't involve radiation and doesn't have side effects, can be done in children and adults multiple times per day, if necessary. In general, medical imaging is a powerful and efficient tool to test new drugs. It can decrease the amount of time and money needed to test the efficacy of new drugs. So I'm certain that we will work closely with multiple research groups from the Manning Institute in testing their new drugs.

Saurabh Kulkarni, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Cell Biology
Transcript
Honestly, I just love coming to work every day. I love brainstorming with people in my lab, talking to them, dreaming up with new experiments. I love the freedom that comes with scientific curiosity. And I also love looking at the data for the first time. Hi, my name is Saurabh Kulkarni. I'm an assistant professor in the department of cell biology at UVA. And we study the tiny structures inside the cell called centrioles and cilia. And they're present in almost every cell of your body. We study how they’re assembled, maintained, and regenerated. And when there is a problem, a lot of devastating diseases happen, like congenital heart disease, respiratory defects, kidney dysfunction, and neurodevelopmental disorders. So we use Xenopus as a model system combined with human cells and computational modeling, and genome engineering to understand the molecular rules that regulate the assembly of these structures. In one sentence, DNA to decision. Our lab sits at the intersection of cell biology, human genetics, and precision medicine. When a patient is diagnosed with a rare disease and the genetic test come back negative, the family sit with that decision for years to come. We take on that challenge, we classify those variants, we tell the families what the disease is, and we tell the clinicians how to manage it. Our research has so far identified many new gene disease associations, reclassified variants, identified new biological mechanisms, and also have managed patients better clinically.

Stefanie Redemann, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics
Transcript
I like that it sometimes feels like a detective story where you have to solve a puzzle and you really need to work in a team to get the answer. I enjoy working with students and my lab members and to collaborate with scientists all around the world to work towards one common goal. I really love that you may discover something that really matters to someone at some point. And so I think it's this combination of teamwork, curiosity, and the chance to contribute to humanity that I love about my job. I'm Stefanie Redemann, and I'm an associate professor in the department of molecular physiology and biological physics. When a cell divides, and it does this millions of times in our bodies, then it has to make an exact copy of the DNA and equally distribute it to the two arising daughter cells. And what I find fascinating is that the structure self-assembles, you know, and so we really want to understand how it assembles, how it functions, and how it makes sure nothing goes wrong. And to do this, we use some of the most powerful microscopes in the world that really allow us to zoom in and look at the structure of the spindle. And by looking at this structure, we can really learn the underlying principles, how this structure functions, and most importantly, if it fails, why did it go wrong? When cell division goes wrong, so when the cell makes a mistake and the chromosomes end up in the wrong place, it has really severe consequences. It's a hallmark for cancer cells and it's a leading cause for miscarriage and infertility. And right now we don't really know how these errors arise. Hopefully by learning about this structure, we hope to develop a knowledge base that will help us to create better treatments, diagnostics, and get a deeper understanding of some of the most devastating diseases we face.

Manoj Patel, PhD, is a Professor of Anesthesiology; Hannah Grote is a PhD student
Transcript
Dr Patel:
My name is Manoj Patel and I'm a co-PI on this epilepsy training grant with Mark Beenhakker, and today I've got Hannah with me.
Hannah:
Hi, my name is Hannah Grote. I'm in Jaeda Coutinho-Budd's lab and I'm a recipient of the Epilepsy T32.
Dr Patel:
The importance of any T32 training program is to train the next generation of scientists. The epilepsy training program's goal is to train the next generation of epilepsy scientists. UVA has a rich and sustained history producing world-class epilepsy researchers.
Hannah:
From my perspective, I currently work in a Drosophila neurobiology lab. I'm investigating neuron-glia interactions in seizure generation. My research really focuses on more granular aspects of molecular pathways and genetics. One of the benefits of this T32 training program for me is access to clinical experiences. I'm also really excited about the opportunity to shadow physicians as part of this training program, where I'll be able to go shadow physicians and speak with epilepsy patients, which both really helps with my motivation for my research, and also allows me to communicate with those patients to discuss what I'm working on, and how my research on a more basic level can translate more clinically through translational research.
Dr Patel:
The mentoring and training environment at UVA is unique because it combines highly
motivated mentors, as well as a highly collaborative environment. The epilepsy training program includes both basic scientists who provide training in cutting-edge scientific techniques, but also clinicians who bring the clinical aspect of the disease.
Hannah:
So from a student perspective, the UVA mentorship environment is really unique because of the really engaged faculty. So I've taken lots of classes as part of the neuroscience department and I've been able to work with lots of different faculty week through week and I think it just really shows that the UVA faculty really care about having deep discussions with students and promoting their training.
Dr Patel:
Think of it not just as a source of funding for students, although that’s very important, but see it as a structured scientific training program. Find mentors whose research aligns with the program and take advantage of the highly collaborative nature at UVA. In addition, seek out those who've been awarded a T32 and get their advice on how you may want to approach this. Take advantage of the highly collaborative nature of UVA and write that T32, it's well worth it.
Hannah:
My advice for student applicants first and foremost is to always apply. If your research is applicable and you’re really interested in what you're working on and want to present it to UVA, I think it's always well worth it to apply for the program. It's a really great way to get practice writing about your science and thinking about your project as a whole.

Matthew Reilley, MD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine
Transcript
So my favorite part about my research, as a clinical researcher, is getting to care for patients in the clinic. I particularly focus on developing new therapies for cancer. And so whenever I meet a patient, I'm trying to think what is the best way we can incorporate new therapies and potentially give them treatment that goes above and beyond, what they could otherwise receive as a standard of care treatment. My name is Matthew Reilley. I'm an associate professor of medicine in the department of medicine, division of Hematology-Oncology. My research focus is primarily on running clinical trials for patients with cancer. My main focus in the clinic is seeing patients with gastrointestinal cancer and offering them trials, but I also run our phase one clinical trial program, which is focused on offering the most novel therapies and new therapies to patients. My research really is at the intersection of a lot of the work that’s done in the preclinical space, developing new therapies, new targets for drugs, and taking those ideas and those medicines and moving them into the human space. I get really excited when I can find a therapy that shows a lot of promise and the right patient and match those two up. And it takes a brave patient who wants to say, "I'm gonna be the first person or one of the first people in the world to try a new drug,” but when we can make that match work and we see somebody do better and live longer because of it, that's what really makes this job worthwhile to me.

Uta Erdbrügger, MD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine
Transcript
What I love most about my research is that my scientific work brings together experts from different scientific fields to uncover novel messengers in the body. They are called extracellular vesicles. And we try to understand how they shape health and disease. But what makes it truly meaningful is my goal to translate these discoveries to better meet my patients' needs and ultimately improve diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment. My name is Uta Erdbruegger. I'm a physician scientist and kidney doctor in the division of nephrology. My translational research focuses on extracellular vesicles as biological messengers. Some of my work is foundational science, exploring new mechanisms, but also translational, identifying biomarkers for kidney and vascular disease. Our recent work, for example, provides the first clues as to why patients with chronic kidney disease develop accelerated heart disease. Early data from human studies suggest that EVs released from the injured kidney travel to the heart and contribute to heart failure. My hope is that my research will advance human health by uncovering clinically relevant biomarkers and mechanisms that serve as therapeutic targets. Many of my patients live with conditions that remain silent until significant damage has occurred, highlighting the need for sensitive biomarkers for early detection. Earlier detection enables earlier, more effective intervention. Extracellular vesicles are also emerging as drug delivery vehicles, offering opportunities for precision medicine. And this vision linking early diagnosis with targeted therapy aligns closely with the mission of the Manning Institute.

Chiara Fabris, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry & Neurobehavioral Sciences

Hui Li, PhD

Transcript
I love our research mainly because of two reasons. One is research is super exciting. I often tell my trainees that the experiment we set up, nobody else has done it before, and it's really super exciting to see the result, doesn't matter if it’s negative or positive result. And it's really the first time that a Homo-sapien ever see that kind of result. So I thought it's super exciting. Second is research brings hope. So some of our research really has very translational aspect. And we're hoping our research will really bring hope to a lot of hopeless situations, such as very desperate cancer. My name is Hui Li. I'm a professor in the department of pathology. I'm a co-founder and director for the Center for RNA Science and Medicine, as well as a program leader in the Comprehensive Cancer Center. We do three things in the lab. One is conducting cutting-edge basic science discovery, and some of our findings are challenging existing dogmas. Second is we're conducting clinically-driven translational research. And the last is really educating the next generation of scientists and physicians. There are really two lines of research we're doing in the lab. The first one is on chimeric RNA. These are the RNA molecules that exon from one gene splice to exon of another gene. We think it's a way to expand functional genome. At the same time, in the cancer situation, they can go wrong. So they could be potential biomarkers and prognosis markers, as well as maybe cancer vaccine new antigens. The second line is on a new oncogene that we've discovered, and it is a powerful oncogene driving a lot of tumor genesis in many cancer types. We're developing small molecule inhibitors to target this novel oncogene.

Gloria Sheynkman, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics
Transcript
What I love about my research is that I get to build a dynamic community of researchers and students that all have the shared passion of proteoform medicine. And the very, very best part is that I get to see this potential in individual students, the potential they don't even see, and help grow that so that they can be the next generation of our scientists. Hi, my name’s Gloria Sheynkman, and I am a faculty member in the department of physiology and biophysics. The problem that I solve: did you know that you only have 20,000 genes? That's the same number as a fly or a worm. What makes us different is what the genes, what your genes are making, all of the different proteins. And you have over a million proteoforms in your body. We've only just begun with these new analytical technologies like mass spectrometry and long-read sequencing. We can now measure these proteoforms, and that's what my lab works on. Our mission is to make proteoform medicine a reality. In your body, you have millions of proteoforms, and they must be in perfect balance in order for you to have a healthy life. We find what those imbalances are when you have disease, and we work to restore those imbalances through novel therapeutic approaches like genetic engineering and pharmacology. We're here to make proteoform medicine a reality.

Todd Stukenberg, PhD is a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics
Transcript
So cancer is a huge challenge. But what makes it really fun is talking about your discoveries or challenges with your students, postdocs, and colleagues. There's something really wonderful about sharing an idea or working through a problem with a friend, and that's just what keeps me going. And in fact, one of the reasons I'm still at UVA after 25 years is that we have a wonderful collegial environment that really encourages such conversations. So my name is Todd Stukenberg. I'm a professor in the biochemistry and molecular genetics department. And my lab studies how cells segregate chromosomes during mitosis. I'm interested in both the basic science mechanisms of how they do this, and I'm also interested in how cancer cells change the process, which allows cancer cells to have different number of chromosomes, and that drives the tumor evolution. At one point I was talking to a colleague in public health, and he was telling me about a health disparity where black women have more aggressive breast cancer subtypes. And so I asked one evening, sitting around my office, is it possible the mechanisms I've studied actually underlie this disparity? And so I spent the night studying all kinds of things and actually came to the conclusion that I think we might be at the heart of this problem. So together we've been working for the last year to try to discover how the mechanisms that I’ve studied using basic science mechanisms are underlying this important public health disparity.

Kara Wiseman, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Public Health Sciences
Transcript
What I love about my research is that I get to work as part of a team to better understand health behaviors that hopefully has a population health impact. I am Kara Wiseman. I'm an assistant professor in the department of public health sciences, and my research is focused on the development and evaluation of scalable health behavior change interventions, primarily focused on smoking cessation and alcohol use. For me, scalable means technology-based interventions and text messaging, in particular, so that the interventions I work on can be as accessible as possible to the people who might want to use them. I also sometimes lead research to better understand health behaviors and people's beliefs about behaviors and cancer risk factors to inform future intervention development. So my research, if successful, has the potential to directly impact human health by helping people change their behaviors and reduce their cancer risk, hopefully doing this through tools that are accessible and easy to integrate into our everyday lives. And we know that changing our behavior can be hard. So if we can find ways to make it easy or simple, that makes me think there’s the best chance of someone being able to actually make a change and be successful at having the health that they want to have.

Ian Wenker, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology
Transcript
What I love is coming in every day here at UVA. It's such a creative process doing research, and I love sharing it with the people I work with, such smart and passionate people here at UVA, both that work for me and those I collaborate with across campus. I also enjoy engaging with the community. I work with a number of patient populations across the country, where they give me a lot of feedback on what we're doing and they're excited about the work we do, which just reinvigorates me to do all that we can every day. My name is Ian Wenker. I'm an assistant professor in the anesthesiology department. My overall research focus for years has been understanding how the brain controls automatic processes that we all do, like breathing, cardiovascular function, heart rate, things like that. And right now, a big focus of the lab is trying to understand how the brain contributes to what's called sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. So people with epilepsy-unfortunately some fraction of them- will experience this where they're found deceased and we don't understand yet why. And so in the lab, we’re trying to understand what the mechanisms of that are. And it's still early stages, but we've been making good progress and we're hopeful to make an impact. So our work on SUDEP, or sudden unexpected death in epilepsy is basic in that we're trying to understand mechanisms that create this fatal complication in epilepsy. And we're hopeful that once we understand these mechanisms, we’ll be able to translate them into therapies so that the people who are taking care of those with epilepsy will be able to intervene and save their life, and this will allow them to hopefully sleep better at night and be able to better take care of their loved ones.

Kelly Shaffer, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry & Neurobehavioral Sciences
Transcript
What I love about my work is that it takes care and makes it more flexible to work for real people with full lives. So, so many people could benefit from psychosocial support who can't currently access it because of things like distance or time or cost, and that’s especially true for busy family caregivers and cancer survivors who are adjusting to life after treatment. So what my work does, is I take evidence-based programs and bring them online so that people can access them from their own homes and on their own schedules. I'm Kelly Shaffer, associate professor in the department of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences and a member of the Center for Behavioral Health and Technology. In our center, we build internet delivered programs that bring mental health to scale, and my work in particular focuses on helping cancer survivors and family caregivers with things like sleep, stress, and sexual health. The biggest impact of my research is access. We’re reaching people who might otherwise go without support because they live far from a cancer center or just can't fit another appointment into their busy day. By bringing proven behavioral health programs online, more people can benefit from these treatments. It's about making sure that good care can reach everybody who needs it, not just those who can get to us.

Adam Goldfarb, MD, is a Professor of Pathology
Transcript
Like many people engaged in medical research, I thrive on the process of discovery, of finding things that are unanticipated or novel. I'm particularly visually-oriented, and that's one reason clinically why I pursued the specialty of pathology. And so during the research, if I find something that's a novel site or see something that’s never been seen before, particularly something unanticipated or something that contradicts my expectation, that is really what sweeps me off my feet. I'm Adam Goldfarb. I'm a professor of pathology in the department of pathology, and my research focuses on the development of cells in the bone marrow that lead to the production of red blood. cells and platelets. My research tries to understand the molecular process by which these cells develop toward identifying new treatments for patients with certain types of anemia and certain patients with low platelet counts. My research on red cell production is focused on understanding the basis for anemia and some chronic illnesses, particularly chronic renal failure. In that research, we have identified a small molecule treatment that potentially could be applicable in this setting. My research on platelet production has identified a mechanism for low platelet counts that exists in premature infants, and we've identified a small molecule that could potentially be used as a treatment in that setting.

Mohammad Fallahi-Sichani, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Transcript
What I love most about my research is the process of discovery- untangling how human cells work as complex systems, figuring out where things could go wrong, and using that knowledge to improve therapies for human patients. I also love that my work sits at the interface of biology, medicine, and engineering, enabling me to connect ideas across these fields to tackle complex diseases such as cancer in collaborative and creative ways. My name is Mohammad Fallahi-Sichani. I'm an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia. My lab uses a combination of experimental and computational tools to study how human cells change their identity or behavior in response to different environments and genetic cues. This flexibility known as cell state plasticity is essential for normal functions such as cellular differentiation and stress adaptation, but also enables tumor cells to become more aggressive and resistant to therapies. These are currently important challenges facing cancer treatment. By uncovering fundamental mechanisms of cell state plasticity, we aim to enable more precise cancer therapies. This means that ultimately we can help prevent metastasis and resistance to therapies for cancer patients. The Manning Institute for Biotechnology can help us translate these mechanistic insights into real world therapies that are safer and more effective for patients.

Melanie Rutkowski, PhD is an Associate Professor of Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology
Transcript
Having a biomedical research lab here at the University of Virginia reminds me of a "choose your own adventure" novel. It's a mystery with twists and turns everywhere. Usually, there are more questions than there are answers, and generally the direction that you often set out in is absolutely wrong. However, when you're able to piece together multiple threads of a project in order to address fundamental questions within cancer biology or when your trainees stumble upon a potentially impactful therapeutic paradigm, there's nothing more gratifying about this career. My name is Melanie Rutkowski, and I'm an associate professor in the department of microbiology, immunology, and cancer biology. And my lab is interested in studying interactions between our immune system and the commensal microbiome, the millions of microorganisms that inhabit our body. And we are interested in understanding how these interactions between our immune system and the microbiome impact cancer outcomes. When the microbiome is in a healthy and balanced state, it actually provides several benefits to our health and longevity. In cancer patients, the microbiome becomes dysregulated, and that has an impact on the immune system, enhancing metastasis and leading to poor response to immune therapies. We are hoping to partner with the Manning Institute of Biotechnology so that we can catalyze our fundamental discoveries into paradigm-shifting immune therapies, not only for cancer patients, but also other diseases in which the microbiome is dysregulated.

Rahul Sharma, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine
Transcript
We are researching how environment in cells, aging, or genetic factors can influence the balance of the immune system that might lead to autoimmune or inflammatory diseases. Hi, I'm Rahul Sharma. I'm an associate professor in the department of medicine. I'm a scientist, educator, and entrepreneur. I'm a course director for immunology for the UVA School of Medicine. I run a training program for undergraduate students to bring them into kidney research, because more than 10% of our population is on the verge of developing kidney disease, but not many researchers. I also run the networking core of another training program for pre-docs and post-docs to foster collaboration across the Commonwealth of Virginia. So it's a partnership between UVA, VCU, Virginia Tech, and Virginia Health Sciences. Specifically, in my lab, we are studying a category of immune cells known as T regulatory cells or Tregs. These cells maintain immune balance by controlling other immune cells. And quite recently, our work has shown that these Treg cells can also interact with stem cells in the tissues and help with tissue regeneration and repair. We have developed novel drug candidates to boost the function of these Treg cells to help in autoimmune diseases by controlling the immune system and tissue repair. This has led to development of a startup company which has gotten attention from multiple pharmas to help develop this into a therapy. If successful, this can help people with autoimmune diseases, anybody going through chronic inflammation or major trauma or major surgeries and organ transplantation. Our goals align with the mission of the Manning Institute for Biotechnology. And we're excited that this institute might offer a one-stop solution or a home for groups like us to develop future therapies.

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Thomas Platts-Mills, MD, is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Asthma/Allergy/Immunology
Transcript
The real pleasure is hearing patients describe something that doesn't make sense and thinking, "Wait a minute. That means that I'm thinking wrong.” We need to understand the relationship between allergens and asthma, which I worked on for many, many years. And in England, that was about house dust and asthma. We realized that the patients didn't know that they were inhaling any dust and then realized that it was fecal particles of mites that got in the lungs, and they're only inhaling a few a day. And it explained a great deal about the disease. I'm Tom Platts-Mills. I was recruited here to start the allergy division, and we built it up from scratch. And we do research on allergic disease in my clinic, measuring IgE antibodies to many different allergens, including allergens that we first realized identified here. Because we start off with questions that we hear from patients, it directly impacts almost everything we've done. But the alpha-gal syndrome is probably the best example because we heard these patients saying they got hives four hours after eating meat, and we didn't believe it at first. And then we heard it too often. And then we started investigating and realizing that these people had IgE to a sugar is present on all non-primate mammals. And from that, we got through to the tick bites and understanding the alpha-gal syndrome.

Anny Xiaobo Zhou, PhD, is a Professor of Medicine
Transcript
I love my research because it's translational feature. It bridges human genetic discovery with cell and molecular mechanism. I also love my research because it involves cross-disciplinary collaborations from human genetics, network science, structural biology, biochemistry, and bioengineering. Hi, my name is Anny Xiaobo Zhou. I'm a professor in medicine, pulmonary and the critical care division in the department of medicine. I also have a joint appointment with the department of Genome Science. I serve as inaugural director for the Center of the Translation of Genomic Initiative. Our research program aims to characterize the function of genetic variants identified from genome-wide association studies. And therefore, designing novel drug targets to treat lung disease. Drugs that target genes identified from human genetic discovery, such as GWAS, have doubled or tripled success rate in clinical trials, as demonstrated in metabolic disease, neural disorder, and cardiovascular disease. We apply similar approach in lung disease by integrative genomic approach at a single cell level, combined with organoid models to identify the novel insights in lung biology and also identify the novel drugs to treat patients, millions of patients who are affected by COPD, asthma, and pulmonary fibrosis. This aligns very well with the mission of the Manning Institute.

Gordon Laurie, PhD, is a Professor of Cell Biology
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There are no effective treatments for many chronic diseases. One approach is an unbiased screen. We did this to address the most common eye disease and discovered a new protein that we named Lacritin. We have now successfully taken Lacritin into a large clinical trial, with two more underway. This basic science exploration and discovery, linked to clinical, translation is what I love about research. My name is Gordon Laurie. I am a professor of cell biology. The more my team studies Lacritin, the more interesting features and potential applications we discover. As cell biologists, we dissect how Lacritin works and seek out other labs in the US and overseas to help. Our goal is a more rigorous understanding that is essential for further clinical application. This discovery has inspired the founding of two companies. One is developing Lacritin eye drops for chronic surface-of-the-eye diseases. It is also collaborating with the US Army to study whether the same drug will accelerate ocular wound healing, such as occurs in the field or after Lasik surgery. Using a different Lacritin drug, another company is seeking to prevent the early onset of type 1 diabetes. Both may take years to FDA approval. We hope that this research, made possible with NIH funding, your tax dollars, will benefit many, both here and worldwide.

Zhenqi Liu, MD, is a Professor of Medicine
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So I'm pretty good at math and I love to solve puzzles. And in my line of work, diabetes is the biggest puzzle. There are a lot of people getting diabetes, but we don't exactly know who will get it and who will not. So working with others and looking at the underlying molecular mechanisms driving diabetes and its complications, hopefully we can find a cure and this is a really rewarding process. My name is Zhenqi Liu, a professor of medicine at the University of Virginia. I'm a clinical endocrinologist treating patients with a variety of hormonal disorders, including diabetes. My laboratory is focused on how insulin works in the body, including vasculature and skeletal muscle, trying to understand the molecular mechanisms so that we can find treatment for it. Our research has shown that insulin normally improves blood flow to the tissue, which increases the delivery of oxygen, nutrients and hormones to the tissue, which helps maintain tissue function. In people with diabetes, this effect is reduced or completely gone. Our goal is to discover the underlying mechanisms so that we can design specific studies to target those defects. The goal is eventually to improve people's health so that they can live a longer and productive life.

Josh Colston, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine
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What I most love about my research is that every day I get to grapple with some of the big challenges facing humanity: things like climate change, health equity, big weighty themes that can seem intractable but that are really at the forefront of our minds these days. I'm lucky enough to collaborate with some amazing scientists around the world in countries like Peru, Bangladesh, Ghana, places that have fewer resources than we do here, that have enormous amounts of human potential and where scientific evidence has a great opportunity to make a big impact. I'm Josh Colston. I'm an epidemiologist, spatial demographer, and an assistant professor at the UVA School of Medicine. So I've dedicated my research career to understanding the complex and interrelated health challenges that children and their families face in low resource and tropical regions of the globe. And I do that using satellite, household survey and health surveillance data sources. So I really believe that scientific evidence has the potential to bring about transformative change to the lives of even the most marginalized people. So I strive in all my work to have our research findings disseminated as widely as possible to the stakeholders and the decision makers who need the most in the areas where it can have the most impact so that they can have all the information they need at their fingertips for targeting health interventions to save the lives of children.

Carrie Cowardin, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics
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The thing I love most about my research is how thrilling it is to discover something that no one else has ever seen before. My lab works on the gut microbiome, which is home to trillions of microbes that interact with the human body in many different ways. It's a really complex system, and so there's still a lot we don’t understand about how it works. That means every day in the lab is really different, and I'm always learning something new. I also love interacting with the trainees at UVA who are just really fun and so smart and talented, and they make this job really rewarding and fun. My name is Carrie Cowardin, and I'm an associate professor in the department of pediatrics. My lab studies how nutrition and the gut microbiome control immune development in early life. We're really focused on childhood undernutrition, which unfortunately is still really common. Current treatments for undernutrition are not very effective, and so we're looking for ways that we can use the gut microbiome to try to improve intestinal function in these children and improve their ability to grow in early life. We're also interested in expanding these studies to US-based populations, such as infants born preterm. I'm really motivated to see our research have a tangible impact on child health, both within the US and globally. Right now, one of our projects is focused on identifying dietary ingredients that can boost beneficial bacteria in the preterm infant gut. We're hopeful that this will eventually lead to a treatment that we can create in collaboration with the Manning Institute for Biotechnology.

Ilya Levental, PhD, is Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics, and Kandice Levental, PhD, is a Research Associate Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics
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I love that we get to investigate the fundamental mechanisms of how cells work. And a complex organism, like you or me, is composed of trillions of cells, all working in synchrony and synergy. And so modern science is really just scratching the surface of how all this works. And it's really thrilling to be able to approach and try to answer some of the biggest and most important problems in science. Complexity even extends to lipid membranes, which are a cell’s barrier to the outside world. The membranes are much more complex, diverse, flexible, intricate than would seem to be necessary for their function. And while we don’t understand their underlying mechanisms, we believe that they’re necessary for the cell to accurately receive and transmit information from their ever-changing outside world. In our lab, we apply our engineering background with biophysics to cell biology to answer exciting cell biology questions related to the chemistry and physics of cellular membranes in a unique way. My name's Kandace Levental. I'm a research associate professor in the department of molecular physiology and biophysics, and part of the Center for Membrane and Cell Physiology. And my name is Ilya Levental. I'm a professor in the same department. We run the lab together, and we're trying to understand how cells work. And specifically, we focus on cell membranes, which are these thin bags that encapsulate and organize all of the biochemistry in all living cells. And these membranes are made of fats, the very same fats that we consume as part of our diet. And so for membranes, it's literally true that you are what you eat. And so we try to understand how dietary fats change the composition, organization of membranes and control cellular function. And in particular, we’re focused on the immune system and understanding how the membranes in immune cells survey our bodies to regulate pathogens and cancers. It's clear that diets and their associated metabolic consequences are amongst the greatest determinants of human health and disease. The most obvious, of course, is the connection between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. But it's also true that diets and their metabolic consequences are important risk factors for almost all diseases, pretty much all cancers, for example. So while we understand that diets are critically important, in many cases, in most cases, we don't know why. What is it about saturated fats that tends to cause atherosclerosis and atherosclerotic plaques? Why are trans fats harmful while omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids are broadly beneficial? We think that understanding how these dietary lipids incorporate into cell membranes, regulate their organization, and modulate the signaling is really exciting molecular explanation for how dietary lipids affect human health and disease.

Lian-Wang Guo, PhD, is a Professor of Surgery
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I do cardiovascular research and I believe it's important. I love what I do. It doesn't feel like a job. It's more like a lifestyle. I enjoy coming to the lab every day, working with young scientists to find something new. My name is Lian-Wang Guo, and I'm a professor in the department of surgery. When an artery is clogged, doctors can insert a balloon catheter to re-open it or use open graft to bypass a clogged artery to resume blood flow. But the problem is the disease will come back, so called restenosis. My lab investigates why it happens and how to prevent it. We are especially interested in some chromatin-associated proteins that regulate disease-related gene programs. Our studies suggest that targeting these epigenetic regulators could outperform current methods by reducing side effects. With collaborators, we have developed nanoparticle systems that can provide localized, targeted, and sustained drug delivery to prevent restenosis. It's so exciting to see the real potential of our work to help patients. This kind of innovation supports the mission of the Manning Institute of Biotechnology.

Benjamin Purow, MD, is a Professor of Neurology
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I love having the opportunity to spend my days working hard to come up with new and potentially creative approaches to fighting glioblastoma and other brain tumors, and hopefully have an impact outside of that, as well. I'm Benjamin "BJ" Purow. I'm a neuro-oncologist physician scientist here at the University of Virginia. I see patients with brain tumors, both adult and a few pediatric. In my research time, we look at a range of approaches in the laboratory to better treat glioblastoma and other brain cancers. In particular, I'm excited about better using existing drugs and agents, either alone in new ways or in combinations. For example, we have a combination now that's actually over the counter that we think can meaningfully boost immune system activity. We're hopeful that our research can impact human health ultimately in various ways. We're focused, of course, specifically on ways to treat brain tumors, but some of the things we do could also have a broader impact. For example, combining over-the-counter agents to better boost the immune system could lead to new approaches, not just across cancer, but also for infectious diseases very broadly, for other diseases in neurology such as Alzheimer's disease. So those are the goals.

Ani Manichaikul, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Genome Sciences
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I love my research because of the challenge in putting together different pieces of a puzzle in looking at large scale human data sets. And also the potential to impact the health of individuals in my community. My name is Ani Manichaikul and I'm an associate professor in the department of genome sciences in the University of Virginia School of Medicine. My group performs computational research using large scale human data sets to identify genetic and molecular factors contributing to risk of chronic respiratory diseases. In collaboration with national and international teams of researchers, our group has already identified dozens of genetic markers contributing to risk of chronic respiratory diseases. Moving forward, our goal is to translate these findings by examining the genetic, molecular, environmental, and ancestral factors contributing to risk of chronic respiratory diseases, ultimately allowing for better prevention and treatment of these diseases for patients in Virginia and beyond.

Mark Okusa, MD, is a Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Nephrology
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I'm a physician scientist, and what that means is that I take care of patients and I conduct research. What I love most is that the questions that I explore in the laboratory help me understand diseases of the kidney that I see in the hospital. This connection between the two allow me to be a better physician and a better scientist. I'm Dr. Mark Okusa. I'm Professor of Medicine, Chief of the Division of Nephrology. I specialize in kidney diseases and in particular, acute kidney injury. My research then focuses on how to understand better mechanisms of this disorder and how to devise therapeutic options to treat acute kidney injury. One of the main mechanisms of acute kidney injury is inflammation. What we’ve discovered is that the brain can control inflammation through the activation of specific nerves. What we've discovered is that we can activate these nerves, not with drugs or with surgery, but with simple harmless ultrasound from a clinical ultrasound machine. This can then block inflammation and then block acute kidney injury. We are now involved using this approach in clinical trials at the University of Virginia.

Muge Kuyumcu-Martinez, PhD is a Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biological Sciences
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I love the joy in uncovering the mysterious way our heart develops and functions and gives us life. And the best part is I get to do this with brilliant students, postdocs, and trainees. And we get the fulfillment knowing that our work someday will help people with heart disease. My name is Muge Kuyumcu-Martinez. I'm a professor in the department of molecular physiology and biological physics. My research is centered on RNA binding proteins that control how heart genes are turned on and off at the RNA level. Mutations in these RNA binding proteins can cause specific heart defects such as hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a fatal condition in newborns. It turns out that these RNA binding proteins also are affected when we have poor diet or diabetes. Our mission is to stop heart disease that affects adults and babies by uncovering how these RNA binding proteins work and shape the development of the heart. We're working on human heart diseases and despite many medications, heart disease is still the number one killer. So we're working towards restoring gene expression and function in diseased hearts more precisely. And we believe that targeting these RNA binding proteins will help achieve these goals. Having the Manning Institute is going to be instrumental for us to turn our molecular discoveries into real treatments by bringing together scientists and state-of-the-art technologies so that we can fight against heart disease.

Imre Noth, MD, is a Professor of Medicine
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I love my research because I get a chance to actually make a difference. I work in a rare and uncommon set of diseases called interstitial lung diseases. These can be deadly with a high mortality, and I've had the benefit of living through two approved therapies, with more coming, from an era that had none. And so being able to contribute to that with my translational biology portfolio, both from a biomarker standpoint and a clinical trial standpoint, has been incredibly rewarding. My name is Imre Noth, and I'm the Chief of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. I'm a professor of medicine and a translational biologist and clinical trialist. I'm focused on translational biology that’s really transitioning from bedside to bench and back to bedside to figure out both biomarkers and treatments in interstitial lung disease, with the idea of finding new treatments and figuring out how to use our current treatments better. My research actually gets to impact human health quite directly. As a translational biologist focused on implementing that into clinical trials, I get to find things out from bedside to bench and back to bedside. And then we get to test them in those clinical trials and figure out what actually does and doesn't work and be able to monitor those using biomarkers that we've developed. So at the end of the day, we both develop treatments for patients, find out how well they work, and be able to monitor them doing the research that we do.

Karen Fairchild, MD, is a Professor of Pediatrics
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What I love about research is being able to take a clinical problem from the patient's bedside to the laboratory or the clinical research environment and then bring discoveries back to patients to improve their outcomes. We can only do research through collaboration, and I've been fortunate to be able to collaborate with other researchers here at UVA, and also throughout the US and internationally. My name is Karen Fairchild, and I'm professor of pediatrics at UVA in the division of neonatology. Through research, we’ve made amazing progress in the neonatal intensive care unit, discovering ways to help premature babies not just survive, but thrive, and lead long, healthy lives. As a clinician scientist, I've done both clinical and laboratory research in several areas, including hypothermia, which we use for neuroprotection, apnea of prematurity and caffeine treatment, delivery room resuscitation, including delayed cord clamping, and most recently, analyzing vital signs to predict and prevent critical deterioration. My research team at UVA is a world leader in developing early warning systems for sepsis, which is severe life-threatening infection. We've discovered patterns of heart rate and oxygen saturation that occur in the preclinical phase of illness. So our work shows that through artificial intelligence and machine learning, we can save lives by displaying changes in vital sign patterns that can bring clinicians to the right bedside at the right time for earlier diagnosis and treatment, and improved outcomes.

Golam Mohi, PhD, is a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics
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What I love about doing research is that we are uncovering the mechanisms of cancer, which may have profound impact in the management and treatment of cancer patients. Every single day, we are discovering and learning something new about cancer, which inspires us to find a cure for cancer. Hi, I'm Golam Mohi. I'm a professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the UVA Medical School. I'm also a co-leader of the Hematological Malignancies Translational Research team at the UVA Cancer Center. The research in my laboratory focuses on understanding the mechanism of blood cancer. We are interested in understanding how different mutations associated with blood cancer contribute to the disease. Our ultimate goal is to find new therapeutic targets and develop novel therapies for leukemias. Our research is at the interface of basic and translational. We are not only interested in identifying new targets, but we are also validating the targets and conducting preclinical research that can generate data to support future clinical trials. More recently, we have identified PIM1 as a novel target in myelofibrosis. We also identified a second generation PIM kinase inhibitor and conducted preclinical studies that led to the design of a multi-center clinical trial, which is now open in 60 different cancer centers.

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Manoj Patel, PhD, is a professor in the department of anesthesiology.
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I love my research because it's really exploring the unknown and I love to take that journey with the talented grad students, postdocs, and faculty that I have that have the single goal of better understanding epilepsy. Technologies that advance so much that we have really clinically relevant models that we can use to better understand epilepsy. We can now take cells from these patients and grow them in the lab and make them into neurons so that we can really understand at the cellular level what's going on in these patients to generate seizures and cause epilepsy. My name is Manoj Patel, and I'm a professor in the department of anesthesiology. And my research focuses on a rare pediatric epilepsy known as SCN8A epileptic encephalopathy. The SCN8A gene encodes for the Nav1.6 sodium channel isoform, which is heavily expressed in the brain. Mutations in this channel lead to aberrant activity and seizure generation. So we're really interested in understanding how a single base change in this protein can lead to epilepsy. Patients with epilepsy are treated with anti-seizure medications that suppress the seizures. However, they don't go after the underlying mechanism for their epilepsy. With the help of a very talented graduate students, we are using gene therapy techniques known as base editing. We are able to go in and correct the abnormal variant and make it into a healthy variant, thereby treating the underlying cause. This really could be a permanent fix for these patients.

Bradley Gelfand, PhD is an associate professor of ophthalmology.
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I love the thrill of discovery. I love finding out new information and answers to interesting questions. I feel like a kid on Christmas opening up presents. That's what keeps me going. That's really what keeps me engaged and interested in research. My name is Bradley Gelfand. I'm an associate professor of Ophthalmology. I run a research lab whose primary interest is in understanding the mechanisms and potential new therapies for prevalent diseases of the retina, like age-related macular degeneration. My research, I hope, can impact human health in a couple of different ways. First, we're very interested in the underlying causes of retinal diseases, like age-related macular degeneration. By developing a better understanding of how this disease progresses, we hope to ultimately one day develop new kinds of therapies that can help prevent or delay the loss of vision, particularly as people age. In addition, we have a variety of different new exciting therapies and therapeutic strategies that we're very excited about and hope to one day be able to translate to people who currently have the disease.

Anna Cliffe, PhD, is an associate professor in the department of microbiology, immunology, and cancer biology.
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What I love about my research is the potential unexpected twists and turns. So viruses are master manipulators of cells in the immune system. And by following a virus that is very successful and persists in the host, we learn things both about the virus and then things we never expected, such as working on proteins relevant to other diseases that really inform on human health. I'm Anna Cliffe, I'm an associate professor in the department of microbiology, immunology, and cancer biology. And my lab works on herpes simplex virus, which infects over five billion people worldwide and persists for life as a silent infection in the nervous system. And it can come out of this silent infection, a process known as reactivation, and cause disease. And it's also linked to the progression of Alzheimer's disease. So my lab works on how the virus persists in the nervous system, how it comes out of hiding to cause disease, and how it can also impact the long term health of the nervous system and potentially cause Alzheimer's disease. So the most direct impact on human health is trying to prevent the virus from reactivating. So working, for example, with members of the Manning Institute for Biotechnology to develop therapeutics that could either lock the virus down and prevent it from reactivating or targeting those pathways in portion for reactivation. And given the huge number of people infected with the virus and the disease that it causes, which can cause physical disease as well as impact people’s mental health, we think this will have a huge impact on human health worldwide.

Jung-Bum Shin, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Auditory Neurobiology.
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I've always loved getting to know how things work at the fundamental level. And if you have tendencies like that, then being in academic research, it's like being a kid on a playground.
My name is Jung-Bum Chen. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience. And we are working on hearing and deafness. We are especially interested in a cell type called the sensor hair cells that convert mechanical energy arising from sound vibrations into electrical signals that can be interpreted by the brain as sound. And these cells are very important for hearing because in most cases when humans develop hearing loss, it's because of the death of these hair cells. And our team tries to figure out how these cells work at the fundamental molecular level and why they are so prone to damage.
Our ultimate goal is to develop strategies to prevent and to restore hearing loss. And I believe that this mission of ours is well aligned with other things going on at UVA. For example, the Manning Institute for Biotechnology, which is being built as we speak, is being built to promote translational research at UVA and human health in general.

Swapnil Sonkusare, PhD is a Professor of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics.
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So we work on blood vessels because they regulate our blood pressure and blood flow to our organs. We can look at a single vascular cell in the vascular wall, see how it reacts to different signals from the neighboring cells in the wall to maintain normal vascular health. When there is a communication breakdown between different cells in the vascular wall, that can lead to cardiovascular disorders. My name is Swapnil Sonkusare. I am a resident faculty member at the Robert M. Berne Cardiovascular Research Center and professor in physiology. And my team at UVA focuses on proteins called ion channels. And we study how these ion channels in the vascular wall work together to maintain vascular health. Cardiovascular disorders are the biggest cause of death around the world, and abnormal vascular function is a key contributor to these disorders. So my lab at UVA focuses on the harmful signals sent out by vascular cells and how these signals negatively impact the ion channel function in neighboring vascular cells, thereby affecting vascular function. And the goal here is to understand the cellular signals and mechanisms so they can be targeted for therapy in disease conditions like high blood pressure, obesity, atherosclerosis, and lung injury.

Jennifer Charlton, MD, is an associate professor in the Division of Pediatric Nephrology.
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I love that I have the privilege and the pleasure of working with a large diverse group of researchers. I love that I have the opportunity to work with trainees, to teach them about our research and engage them in research. And I love that I have the opportunity to share that research with our patients and our families. My name is Jennifer Charlton. I'm an associate professor in the department of pediatrics. And I am a pediatric nephrologist, which means that I take care of kids that have kidney problems. My lab focuses on adverse maternal environments and how they can impact long-term kidney health, particularly for those that are born preterm or born early. I also collaborate with biomedical engineers from Washington University to develop non-invasive ways of measuring nephron number. So chronic kidney disease affects one in seven adult Americans, and in its most simple definition, chronic kidney disease is too few nephrons to do the work of the kidney. What most people don’t understand is that all of your nephrons in a human are made at the time you're born full-term. If you are born preterm, the risk of chronic kidney disease is much greater, and that is because of the life-saving therapies that these babies undergo at a very early and vulnerable period. My future hope is that our research will impact the lives of these preterm neonates by developing targeted therapies to reduce their risk for chronic kidney disease over their lifetime.

Yun Shim, MD, Professor of Medicine in Pulmonary and Critical Care Division

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What I love about my research is that we are testing and studying why patients are not doing well, and as a physician scientist, I love to address the questions that we don’t really have on the patient’s bedside. And eventually my research is actually soon to be involved in developing therapeutics as well as the diagnostic aspect of how to contribute to the patient care. So that's what I love about it. My name is Yun Michael Shim. I'm a professor of medicine in pulmonary and critical care division, and I also have a joint appointment in medical imaging radiology department. And what I do is spanning from both the preclinical bench science of the lung immunology and host immune response, all the way to the translational research using advanced imaging technology called hyperpolarized xenon MRI. There's two different aspects to my research. One of them is really related to basic science and mechanism-based research. And our goal there is to find out what is really happening in a patient's body and trying to develop some new drugs that can actually counter that. But the more exciting part is that we're actually developing a brand new imaging technology called hyperpolarized xenon MRI. And this is actually developed first at UVA-first patient being done in the whole world at UVA. Our goal is to bring that, not just to research, but into a patient’s bedside so that we can actually use it to give a better diagnosis and also better prognosis for the patients as well.

Clint Miller, PhD, Associate Professor of Genome Studies
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I love finding patterns in discrete data sets that are collected over many time series and conditions and allows us to really hone in on some of those causal mechanisms for diseases, such as cardiovascular disease. I also enjoy the highly collaborative nature of our work. It allows us to interact with experts across the globe in fields, such as computational biology and cardiovascular medicine. Hi, my name is Clint Miller. I'm an associate professor of genome sciences. And our group studies the genetics and genomics of cardiovascular diseases using both computational and experimental approaches. More recently, we’re creating this large integrated atlas of human atherosclerosis, using single cell and spatial modalities. And we're really excited to identify some of those early markers of the disease to prevent some of the initiating events. By studying the disease in its native context in primary human tissues, we can better capture some of these events that may drive transition states, and allow us to better target those with different modalities. And we're particularly excited about leveraging the resources of the Manning Institute, to apply both cell and gene therapies to target some of these processes that go awry during atherosclerosis and in heart disease.

Stephen Rich, PhD, Professor of Genome Sciences
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As a scientist, I think we have to be very curious about how the world works and the people in it. And as a geneticist, even though we share about 99.9% of the human genome, you can look around and see incredible variation, not only variation in how people look and behave, but their risk for disease. And that's what is really inspiring and causing my curiosity in our work in science. Hi, I'm Steve Rich. I'm a professor of genome sciences in the University of Virginia School of Medicine, and our laboratory focuses on the genetic basis of complex human disease, and particularly type 1 diabetes, which is an autoimmune disease in which there’s some event that causes your own immune system to attack the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. And we're focused on understanding that genetic variation and how it may lead to dysfunction of the system, causing mainly children to develop type 1 diabetes and require insulin for survival. So our research is really focused on using genetics as a tool to predict who may be developing or at risk of developing type 1 diabetes, since about 90 to 95% of those who develop it have no symptoms, no family history. So this is something that we can utilize to help identify those who might be eligible for treatment with an FDA-approved drug that delays onset by three years and perhaps with additional research, even longer.

Chelsea Marie Braun, PhD, Associate Professor of Infectious Disease and International Health

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What I love about my research is the ability and freedom to think about big questions that are very impactful for child health, and then think about how our lab can best answer those questions using a variety of techniques ranging from basic benchwork to clinical research in human populations. My name is Chelsea Marie Braun, and I'm an associate research professor of infectious disease and international health. And my lab researches the parasite Cryptosporidium. And we're really interested in understanding across a variety of pathogens, particularly Cryptosporidium, why some people in a particular infection become very sick and other people remain asymptomatic. And we take data derived from human studies and really dig into those findings on a molecular level in our basic research program and try to integrate those findings to advance our understanding of this important question. My research will impact human health because understanding the differences in our individual human genomes that determine our response to an infectious or non-infectious disease has the potential to inform the development of novel host-directed therapies as well as improved vaccine design. We hope we can take findings that we learn from our studies and actually translate these to novel therapies using collaborative team science that’s available to us through our collaborators at UVA and beyond.

Matthew Gurka, PhD, Professor of Public Health Sciences
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I'm a biostatistician that focuses on child health research. What I love about being a collaborative biostatistician is I get to work with a lot of different researchers in a lot of different areas. They get to take their clinical questions and their research questions and turn them into real research, designing their studies and analyzing their data and ultimately answering their questions. I'm also fortunate to be able to take some of those research questions and lead my own research from that. My name is Matthew Gurka, and I'm professor and chair of the department of public health sciences here at UVA. As a biostatistician, I've been recently focusing on pragmatic clinical trials. These are real world clinical trials where we are randomizing, not patients, but providers or clinics to interventions to improve health outcomes in children. As an independent researcher, I continue to work with my longtime colleague in pediatrics, Mark DeBoer, on better ways to measure the metabolic syndrome to better predict diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Our research in metabolic syndrome has led to better ways to measure and track this condition, which will lead to earlier identification of future disease like diabetes and cardiovascular disease. As a biostatistician, it’s been especially gratifying working with investigators in a number of different areas of child health. Just in the past two years, I've helped the development of a large cohort study looking at brain development in early childhood. I've designed a clinical trial that's testing the effectiveness of a mobile health app to improve health outcomes in teenagers with asthma, working with their parents. And I've helped design a pragmatic clinical trial to evaluate innovative ways to deliver care to children with diabetes.

Larry Borish, MD, Professor of Microbiology
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I just love the joy of discovery. I love when you set up an experiment at night, you come in in the morning, you break the code, and those rare times when everything works, you know something that nobody else in the world knows, and it's just incredibly exciting. My name is Larry Borish. I'm a professor in the departments of medicine and microbiology, and I study the interaction of the common cold virus with asthma. Something like 80% of all hospital admissions from asthma exacerbations are caused by the common cold virus. And we're just fascinated by trying to figure out what it is about this otherwise fairly innocuous virus that makes asthmatics' lives so miserable. So what we’ve discovered is, it's not the virus itself-it's not the viral infection that's making the asthma so bad, what the virus is doing is revving up the patient's underlying allergies and causing a severe allergic reaction to whatever is in their environment. So it isn't the virus, it's the fact that they have ongoing exposures to grass or ragweed or cat or to whatever. And it's those allergic reactions that are just getting really revved up. And obviously by making that discovery, we recognize that the treatment is going to be treating the underlying allergies.

Mark Beenhakker, PhD, Associate Professor of Pharmacology
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I think the most exciting thing for me about the science is that it's unpredictable. It's hard to know where we're going to go. We just let the data sort of tell us where our answers lie. We're trying to understand how seizures are generated, and we're using very different technology than we did a few years ago. So hopefully, with new technology, we get greater insights into how seizures are generated in epilepsy. My name is Mark Beenhakker. I'm an associate professor in the pharmacology department at UVA. And my lab studies the basic mechanisms of epilepsy. We're trying to understand where in the brain seizures begin and how they evolve, and we're using electrodes that are implanted in the brain to try to track the seizures across time. And the thing that’s remarkable about epilepsy is that these seizures tend to explode very, very rapidly. So we're trying to identify what structures are beginning the seizures and where the seizures progress, using these electrodes. Epilepsy, of course, is a devastating disease, and it's actually pretty common. It affects anywhere between 1% or 2% of the population at large. And we still are trying to understand how seizures originate in the brain. And with that information, we hope that we can give that to clinicians to develop interventions to target specific brain structures to treat epilepsy. And that, of course, would have a profound impact on the health and the well-being of patients with epilepsy, which is a devastating disease.

Le, Lu, MD, PhD, Professor of Dermatology
Transcript:
As a researcher, it is so fun to make discoveries that no one else in the world have seen before. To find something out for the first time, like looking into the microscope with my students, seeing something that no one else has seen. Those are priceless moments. It is so fun that sometimes I cannot believe I get paid doing what I'm doing.
My name is Lu Le. I am a professor and chair of the department of dermatology at UVA. Our lab studies cancer biology and stem cell biology. We're very interested in understanding how cancer hijacks normal development to their advantage. We specifically focus on neurofibromatosis, a group of genetic conditions that cause tumors to grow on the nerve. I hope to see how research that we do in the lab can turn into effective treatment that makes a big impact for many people around the world.
Our lab has generated multiple novel models of neurofibromatosis to uncover its fundamental biology that we hope will lead to effective treatment for patients with neurofibromatosis. In addition, with our discovery of the epithelial stem cells in the hair follicle that are required for hair formation, we are investigating their potential in human hair follicle for their ability to restore hair growth.

Michelle Bland, PhD, Associate Professor, Pharmacology

Transcript:

My lab uses fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, which is a great genetic model organism, to study how hormones like insulin and how infection control growth and metabolism in young animals. And one of the things that I really love about doing this research, or any research, is that I get to work with really creative people to solve complex problems.

My name is Michelle Bland. I'm an associate professor in the department of pharmacology at the UVA School of Medicine. And my lab studies how hormones like insulin control growth and metabolism. And on the flip side, we study how infection can derail the control of growth and metabolism by insulin signaling. And we do all of this using the genetic model organism, Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly. We use Drosophila because it contains or shares many pathways in common with humans, and because it's a great genetic system that allows us to study multiple genes and how they contribute to the pathways that we’re interested in. We can use fruit flies to answer fundamental questions that we don't really understand in human health. For example, young children infected with bacteria exhibit cognitive dysfunction later in life. My lab is collaborating with the lab across grounds to use fruit flies to study how infection in young animals disrupts brain development. And we can find genes that play a role in this process and may help us to understand this in humans as well.

Gary Owens, PhD, Professor, Department of Molecular Physiology & Biological Physics

Transcript:
I love the thrill of discovering something for the first time, especially when it tells us something about a major human disease, where we might identify a novel therapeutic approach. I love the scientific process where we identify an unmet medical need, thoroughly investigate what's known, devise an experimental strategy for you to answer the question better, and hopefully identify ways of better treating patients.

I'm Gary Owens, the director of the Robert M. Berne Cardiovascular Research Center at the University of Virginia. So my lab studies the disease atherosclerosis, which is the underlying basis of most heart attacks and stroke. We're particularly interested in mechanisms that contribute to formation of this protective fibrous cap, which overlies the lesion and walls it off so you don't have clot formation. The main clinical strategies for reducing heart attacks and strokes have focused mainly on reducing inflammation and lowering LDL cholesterol. In spite of very good drugs to do this, heart attacks and stroke remain the leading cause of death in the US and worldwide. We're trying to identify alternative strategies to augment the benefits of statins and other lipid-lowering drugs.

Karen Rheuban, MD, Professor, Department of Pediatrics

Transcript:
What I love about my research is it's focused on improving access to care for patients using telecommunications technologies. Telemedicine connects patients and healthcare providers to provide the right care by the right provider at the right time.

I'm Dr. Karen Rheuban, professor of pediatrics and co-founder and director of the UVA Center for Telehealth. We've long focused on innovative care delivery models and technologies that enable patients to access our top-notch UVA clinicians and population health programs by eliminating the barrier of distance and importantly, in an emergency, time.

Every specialty and subspecialty at UVA Health has integrated telemedicine into their care delivery models. We support virtual care across the life continuum from high-risk pregnant moms to infants and children to the elderly, in outpatient, inpatient, and post-acute settings and even from ambulances. We support patients directly through their patient portal, but also in partnership with more than 130 facilities such as community hospitals, clinics, skilled nursing, and other healthcare facilities. Our center also studies innovative technologies, brings state-of-the-art solutions and even access to clinical trials for patients in communities where those services might not otherwise be available. Our vision is that no patient in Virginia should be more than 20 minutes from UVA Health, and we are just about there.

Kenneth Bilchick, MD, Professor, Department of Medicine

Transcript:
It's a privilege to do cardiovascular research in addition to taking care of patients with cardiovascular disease. It gives me the opportunity to find ways to improve the care that I deliver to patients. In addition, we get to use sophisticated data from advanced cardiac imaging, like cardiac MRI, and also data from electrocardiograms. We can then apply sophisticated mathematical models and artificial intelligence to find ways to improve outcomes for our patients.

My name is Kenneth Bilchick. I am a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Virginia. In my research, we use cardiac MRI, electrocardiograms, and artificial intelligence to find ways to personalize these therapies for our patients and improve the outcomes from these procedures.

The goal of my research is to help patients with heart disease live long and healthy lives. Right now, in my specialty called clinical cardiac electrophysiology, we have advanced procedures such as catheter ablation, pacemakers, and defibrillators that can very much improve a patient's arrhythmia and improve their overall heart function. Still, there remains a need to personalize therapies for individual patients and improve the way these therapies are delivered. My research uses advanced cardiac imaging and other tools to achieve these goals and help patients have the best health outcomes possible.

Melissa Kendall, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology

Transcript:
What I love about my research is the opportunity to make fundamental discoveries that help us understand how microbes colonize and grow within our bodies, as well as how microbes interact with our immune cells. These discoveries can help my lab and other researchers develop new therapies to treat infectious and autoimmune diseases.

My name is Melissa Kendall, and I'm an associate professor in the department of microbiology, immunology, and cancer biology. My lab is interested in how microbes impact colonic health. We have two major research areas. The first investigates how pathogenic bacteria exploit signals within the host, such as metabolites from our diet, to activate signaling pathways that are important for infection. Our second research area focuses on how specific members of our microbiome regulate immune responses. And we are particularly interested in how microbes control aberrant immune responses to protect from severe inflammation. Our research is essential to developing new therapeutics to control bacterial infections, as well as harness the power of our microbiome to prevent and treat IBD and related diseases. The Manning Institute for Biotechnology will support our research by providing the infrastructure to translate our fundamental discoveries into treatments that can help save lives.

James Brenton, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Neurology

Tajie Harris, PhD

Transcript:

So what I love about my job is that every day I get to come to work and work with the most brilliant people. And we're tackling questions at the interface of how the nervous system interacts with the immune system. And this is important because we think that the immune system shouldn't enter the brain, but it does. And so by tackling these questions, we get to inform new therapies that can treat neurological diseases and disorders.

My name is Tajie Harris, and I'm an associate professor in the department of neuroscience. I'm also the director of the Center for Brain Immunology in Glia. And what my lab wants to do is: understand how the immune system gets into the brain to combat an infection? And what we'll learn from this research is how do we get immune cells into the brain, and could we keep them out if we needed to? So what we’re learning about numerous brain disorders and diseases is that the immune system shows up. We're still trying to understand exactly why it shows up, but in some cases we don’t want it to be there. In the case of multiple sclerosis, or MS, we'd like to keep the cells out. In the case of a brain tumor, we might want to bring more cells in. So what we learn in the lab every day will inform the generation of new therapies that can help to promote the immune system or block the immune system from entering the brain.

Patrick Jackson, MD, Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine


Transcript:
I'm both a physician as well as a scientist. And it’s really exciting to be able to be in the lab with PhD scientists understanding how HIV works at a molecular level, and then go into the clinic and take care of people living with HIV.

My name is Patrick Jackson. I'm an assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health. I work on HIV, and while HIV has a big impact on human health, it's actually a pretty small virus. HIV has to keep all of its genomic information in a really compact package. What I work on is how HIV is able to turn its own genes on and off, and how the virus uses that ability to adapt to different conditions in the human body. We think that the virus's ability to turn its genes on and off could be really important in how it's able to be transmitted between people, and how it can remain in a quiet state that lives for a long time within people living with HIV. We have a lot of really great treatments for HIV, but the thing that we don't have yet is a cure. The virus can persist within people for very long periods of time. It can come back when they stop taking medication. I'm hopeful that understanding how the virus controls its own genes could be one piece of the puzzle that eventually leads us to a cure.

Tarek Abbas, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Radiation Oncology

Transcript:
What excites me the most about what we do is that we try to understand the different mechanisms that are important for sensing and for repairing the different types of DNA damage. This is a key concept in cancer therapy. Most cancer patients receive some kind of either chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and the way that these agents work in the patient is by inflicting damage, particularly the type of damage that are responsible for killing the cancer cells. And so by providing some understanding for these mechanisms, get us closer to finding the right tools to treat different types of patients.

Hi, my name is Tarek Abbas. I'm an associate professor here at the University of Virginia in the department of radiation oncology with the courtesy appointment in the department of biochemistry and molecular genetics. The focus for my research laboratory is to try to understand the specific functions of different regulatory proteins that are able to sense and repair the different types of DNA damage. This is obviously important because different cancer patients respond differently to different treatment. And by understanding these different mechanisms, we may be able to provide the right tools to treat the individual patients towards achieving much more precise personalized medicine. It has been very well known that cancer patients respond very differently to different types of chemotherapy, most of which are actually utilizing the ability to inflict these different types of DNA damage. And one key component for that is a different genetic mutation or background this particular patient has. So by understanding these variable mechanisms of DNA damage and repair, we hopefully will be able to get closer to providing more effective therapeutic strategies to these patients while at the same time minimize toxic side effects.

Laurie Archbald Pannone, MD, Associate Professor, UVA Department of Medicine

Transcript:
I love what I do because I get to work directly with people. As a geriatric physician, I get to work with our patients in the community and other healthcare providers to figure out how to best use technology and telehealth specifically in ways that work for them.

My name is Laurie Archbald-Pannone. I'm a geriatric physician and associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. I work as part of our interdisciplinary team, focusing on improving patient access, care, and care coordination through the use of technology. We work directly with our community partners to understand what's worked for them, what hasn’t worked for them when they've used telehealth in the care of older adults to try to figure out a way to best optimize and implement age-inclusive telehealth. Principles of age-inclusive telehealth include that it is patient-centered, equitable, and accessible, and that it's integrated and coordinated into their overall care.

The goal of our research is to develop ways in which telehealth can be a tool for all of our patients to use. That it can be a tool to decrease barriers and make it easier for our patients to access their healthcare. Whether they're in a hospital, in a nursing home, or in a rural community. Being able to access telehealth using technology that is useful to them, and then it can help improve clinical outcomes and their overall health. frame. Nice. Thank you so much.

Andrew Muck, MD, Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine


Transcript:
Getting to take care of patients in their greatest hour of need in the emergency department is exciting. It's the greatest job in the world. The opportunity then to study and research how to do that better and give patients better care in a more timely and safe fashion is even more exciting, as I'm able to explore that in my research.

I'm Andrew Muck, chair of the department of emergency medicine at UVA. My research is taking advantage of the opportunities given to us by AI and large machine learning. With the help of these AI and large machine learning tools, we are looking at ways to increase efficiency for hospital throughput, how to get the patients in front of a doctor as soon as possible.

With the advent of our electronic medical records, we now have access to large volumes of data. We can now explore that data with large machine learning tools to identify best practices to improve efficiencies in the hospital and the emergency department. We also can detect signs of deterioration. We can look to see when patients in the waiting room are getting sicker. We can better understand when an emergency department is not working as efficiently as it should, when a hospital is not able to handle the capacity of patients it sees and to use these AI and large machine learning tools to see what we can put in the system to bring best care to our patients.

Jeff Saucerman, PhD, Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering

Transcript:
In my lab, we're discovering the biochemical communication networks that control how cells behave. What I really love about this challenge is that cells are way more complicated than an aircraft carrier or an airplane. And so we need to be combining not just biology, but also engineering and AI to map all the things that are going on inside cells, and then use these maps to discover new drugs for disease.

My name is Jeff Saucerman. I'm a professor of biomedical engineering and cardiovascular medicine here at UVA. And my research group combines computational and experimental methods to discover new drugs for heart disease.

Our team has already identified a number of new compounds that, while still at early stages, have the potential to be translated to affect human health down the road. In addition, we’ve identified a number of drugs that have been already approved for other diseases, but we're finding new uses for them in heart disease. And this type of research is really translational, so we can only do this in collaboration with wonderful scientists in the Cardiovascular Research Center, as well as physicians in cardiovascular medicine.

Patrick Finan, PhD, Professor, Department of Anesthesiology

Transcript:
I love the opportunity for abundant creativity in how we approach the problem of chronic pain. I love the opportunity to design and test new ideas and the possibility that if we're successful, we might really be able to help patients with chronic pain.

My name is Patrick Finan. I am a professor in the department of anesthesiology. I'm fortunate to hold the Harold Carron Professorship, which is really such an honor because Dr. Carron was a visionary in the field of pain medicine and specifically was at the forefront of introducing ideas that multidisciplinary pain care was really what patients need. And so to that end, I am a clinical pain psychologist and we approach the field of pain medicine by looking at opportunities to identify and intervene on emotional factors that influence chronic pain.

We use cognitive and behavioral techniques, mindfulness-based meditation interventions and psychedelic-assisted therapies to target mechanisms at the psychological and neural levels that we think are important for patients with chronic pain. Most recently, our lab is focused on positive emotions and reward system function. And our interventions are really geared to give patients tools that they can use to improve their lives on a day-to-day basis and negotiate the difficulties that they experience with the uncertainty of chronic pain.

Loren Erickson, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology

Transcript:
I love biomedical research because it combines two things that I'm very passionate about. One is continual exploration of how our body works and the other is the impact that it has on people's lives.

My name is Loren Erickson and I am an associate professor in the department of microbiology, immunology, and cancer biology, as well as an investigator in the Carter Immunology Center.

I study B cells, which are part of the immune system, which make antibodies that recognize pathogens and protect us against infections. However, in certain individuals, B cells mistakenly recognize harmless substances as dangerous and develop antibodies that cause autoimmunity and allergy, and we're interested in understanding why this occurs. By studying B cells in these diseases, we hope to understand the underlying causes by which they make antibodies that cause autoimmunity and allergy, and we can harness this information to develop therapeutic strategies to treat them.

Xuemei Huang, MD, Professor and Chair, Department of Neurology

Transcript:
I love what I do because I have the opportunity to work with the people: my patients, their families, and the members of their community. Together, they educate, challenge, and humble me and my research team constantly by their needs, yet also provide such gratitude, even when we cannot deliver all they would like to.

My name is Xuemei Huang, the chair of the department of neurology at the University of Virginia. My own research is to improve the diagnosis and treatment of these diseases, such as Parkinson's disease and related conditions, as well as to understand the causes of these disorders.

The impact of the new Manning Institute for Biotechnology was a huge factor in pursuing me to come to UVA. The Manning Institute will bring researchers together to provide the right environment for them to talk and exchange ideas easily. This will keep UVA at the forefront of answering human-related health questions. For me personally, there is a growing burden of neurologic disorders that may be outpacing all the diseases as our population ages. I cannot imagine a better place to start the next chapter of my career to embrace these challenges here, right in the UVA grounds.

Jeff Gander, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Surgery

Transcript:
I get to collaborate with wonderful people from many different fields- pediatricians, nurses, dieticians, pharmacists, social workers, patient care technicians, residents and medical students- to improve the lives of children. Hi,

I'm Jeff Gander. I'm an associate professor of surgery and a pediatric surgeon at UVA Health Children’s. I look at two of the most important issues affecting children today: reducing opiate use and increasing access to healthy food.

Our group looks at ways to limit the amount of opiates a child receives after surgery, from as young as a neonate to as old as a teenager. We have seen that doing this reduces their time in the ICU, gets them eating quicker and going home faster. It also leads to less prescriptions and less opiates in the community. Diet-related diseases are the number one killer of Americans. We are looking at whether a produce prescription program increases the intake of fruits and vegetables in families and whether it can change their habits to hopefully prevent diet-related diseases.

Shayan Moosa, MD, Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery, Department of Neuro-Oncology

Transcript:

I have the privilege of being able to treat patients with complex neurological disorders in the operating room. In my research, I aim to make these surgical treatments more precise but less invasive. What I love about my research is that it has the potential to push the boundaries of what’s possible in medicine. And I'm able to see these positive effects directly in the lives of my own patients.

My name is Shayan Moosa, and I'm a stereotactic and functional neurosurgeon at the University of Virginia. My research deals with focused ultrasound, where we are developing cutting-edge and non-invasive therapies for treating the brain.

Focused ultrasound leverages the power of sound waves, which can travel through the skull to a targeted portion of the brain. And it's this mechanical energy of focused ultrasound that allows us to treat the brain in a non-invasive manner. One example of this is sonodynamic therapy. This is where we administer an inert drug that preferentially accumulates within a tumor, and it becomes activated by the focused ultrasound in order to have a localized cytotoxic effect. This research has the potential to result in novel and non-invasive therapies for the brain. In fact, I can envision a future where we’re able to cure neurological disorders, including brain tumors, without ever having to make an incision.

Laura Newman, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Cell Biology

Transcript:

So what's really incredible about research is that you’re assembling a puzzle, but you don't have the full picture of the puzzle that you’re assembling until you’ve finished assembling it. But once you get that final picture, it's something that's new and can be incredibly transformative and change the way that you view the world around you. And that part of research is incredibly rewarding, and it's rewarding to see how that can drive humanity forward.

My name is Laura Newman, and I'm an assistant professor of cell biology. My research concerns how inflammation is initiated on a cellular level. And primarily, what we're interested in is how a little piece of the cell, called mitochondria, controls the initiation of inflammation.

We've all learned from our biology classes that mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. However, they're way more interesting than that. Mitochondria originated from bacteria, and because of this, they have a wide ability to regulate how the cell responds to inflammation, including the fact that mitochondria are able to trick the cell into thinking that it’s been infected. If we can understand how mitochondria are able to do this, this will help us to develop new therapies to treat a wide variety of diseases where inflammation is dysregulated.

Hao Jiang, PhD, Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics

Transcript:
Our recent work has revealed that some of the most fundamental principles in physics and chemistry govern the very complex biological and pathological processes in our body. While we all assume so, it is actually very satisfying to actually directly see this in our own work. Moreover, the potential to use the knowledge and strategies we develop to benefit human health is very rewarding to me.

I'm Hao Jiang, professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. My laboratory studies how the expression of our genetic information is normally regulated and how cancer and certain developmental disorders are caused by disregulation of gene expression through novel mechanisms, including formation of liquid-like microdroplets of key proteins.

So, based on some of the newly discovered mechanisms in the formation of pathways that support cancer, we're developing strategies to perturb or reverse these processes with the hope that they can be used to treat human diseases driven by these mechanisms. Therefore, I believe that our research provides deeper understanding of how cancer develops and new ways to treat cancer and other diseases.

Steven Munger, PhD., Professor, Co-Director of Research, Otolaryngology, Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery

Transcript:
One of the things that excites me about science is not only finding new answers, but finding new questions to reveal aspects of our world that we didn't even think about before. In our case, the sensory world of smell and taste, how we interact with foods and drink, how we sense dangers, and how disease may change our ability to do those things.

My name's Steven Munger. I'm a professor of otolaryngology and head and neck surgery here at UVA. And our group studies the senses of smell and taste. We're interested not only in the nitty-gritty of the molecular and cellular mechanisms that allow us to detect odors in taste, but also how disease disrupts those senses and impacts our daily lives.

The senses of smell and taste are critical for sensing dangers like smoke or spoiled food, for enhancing the palatability of the things we eat and drink, and for relating to each other. But there's a real need for increased testing, diagnosis, and treatment of smell and taste disorders, something that's really lacking currently in our medical system. Work we're doing now is to try to enhance the diagnostics and treatment of smell and taste to help to treat the millions of patients that are suffering from these disorders.

Chris Holstege, PhD, Professor, Department of emergency medicine and pediatrics

Transcript:
It's the multi-collaborative work that is actually probably the most fun from my standpoint. There are some great people doing this research, and it's really a community that does work in the toxicology realm. The research that we do has just been a phenomenal experience in my 26 years here at the University.

My name is Chris Holstege. I'm a professor in emergency medicine and pediatrics, and I'm the division chief of medical toxicology.
As you can imagine, at this time in society, there's a plethora of substances coming into society. Various drugs, things that are of risk to our populations. We're very closely, to do epidemiologic research as to what agents are coming in and to assure that if there's a danger to society working with others, such as the government, to make sure those are banned or taken off of the market.

It's exceedingly important that we're following trends and what kind of impacts they are. What's causing seizures in children? What's causing kids and poisonings to go to hospitals and making sure that we put restrictions or put protections on those. We're seeing a plethora of drugs entering society and other substances, that can prove to be a danger, to the young and to the old alike.


We've had some really high-profile criminal cases that we've actually worked to that I have started. But then my colleagues, I've worked with my colleagues across the globe, to try to both mitigate problems that are arising or to bring justice when, for example, there's a criminal poisoning that occurs.

Mark DeBoer, MD, Professor, Division of Pediatric Endocrinology, Department of Pediatrics

Transcript:
I love that research gives you a chance to answer questions that no one has previously had the answers to. And since there are a lot of those kinds of questions, one of my favorite things about research is having a variety of topics I can work on at the same time. In any given week, I'll be working with some of the smartest diabetes technology engineers in the world to try to improve blood sugar control for children and adults with type 1 diabetes, or working with a long-term research partner in studying the metabolic syndrome in its health consequences.

I'm Mark DeBoer, and as a pediatric endocrinologist, I have chances to study hormonal problems and solutions for optimal health. I work with the UVA Center for Diabetes Technology in harnessing algorithms designed here at UVA to automate insulin delivery with a diminished need for patient time and trouble. I also do research in Tanzania with infectious disease and developmental physicians and an incredible field team in studying growth challenges among children in difficult nutritional settings. And I have a long-standing collaboration with Matt Gurka in public health sciences using a metabolic syndrome severity z-score that we developed as a tool to assess cardiovascular risk and track treatment progress.

As a physician, I've had the joy of seeing some of the technology developed at the Center for Diabetes Technology become available for clinical use for my patients. Going from approaches that were just a vision of the CDT founders, and were frankly doubted by many at first, to being widely available. I'm hoping that we'll see that same kind of translation from some of what we learn about childhood growth in developing areas, and in using the metabolic syndrome to motivate patients to improve their health outlook.

Craig Portell, MD, Associate Professor, Division of Hematology & Oncology

I love what I do because I take care of patients with lymphoma, and using our clinical research tools, we are able to improve their disease, their symptom burden, and hopefully try to cure their disease as much as possible.

My name's Craig Portell. I'm an associate professor of medicine in the Department of Hematology & Oncology. My clinical focus is in lymphomas and CLL. Lymphomas are cancers of the bloodstream, kind of immune system cancers.

And our goal in doing research in these diseases is to understand the diseases better, both utilizing prior patients' outcomes, some pathologic data, as well as understanding new treatments that are available for these patients. And we collaborate with various different institutions around the country, as well as the National Cancer Institute and pharmaceutical companies. My work in clinical research in lymphoma is really focused on improving patient outcomes, so sometimes that means identifying groups of patients who may not have the best outcomes with our current treatments and identifying better treatments for them. The goal of our research is to improve patient outcomes by focusing on biology that then allows us to decrease toxicity, yet still increase the chance of cure for their disease.

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Marilyn Huang, MD, Professor, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology


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I love being able to elevate women's health across their cancer spectrum, from diagnosis to surgical treatment, to medical management and into survivorship.

My name is Marilyn Huang. I am a professor and director of gynecologic oncology. My primary research focus has been in developmental therapeutics and novel drug combinations across the spectrum of gynecologic malignancies, particularly with a focus in immunotherapy as a clinical trialist. I've also had the opportunity to develop both therapeutic and non-therapeutic trials to address cancer care delivery gaps, from prevention to management of toxicities and survivorship.

One study that I'm working on that I'm really excited and passionate about is chemotherapy or treatment-induced peripheral neuropathy, which is numbness and tingling that can occur in the hands and the feet. It can cause difficulty with walking, buttoning buttons, things that would impact patients on a day-to-day basis. And so looking at ways to improve our diagnostic ability, and then ways to improve our management and treatments of the peripheral neuropathy.

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Jamie Zoellner, PhD, Professor, Department of Public Health Sciences

What I love most about my research is I get to wake up every day thinking about rural health communities, particularly in Southwest Virginia, which is the Appalachia part of our state, but I get to work with amazing stakeholders every single day in schools and Head Starts, and federally qualified health centers, really just working alongside like-minded people who are trying to improve the overall health of their communities.

My name is Jamie Zoellner. I'm a professor of public health sciences. I'm also a registered dietician and am one of the co-directors of our Center for Community-Based Health Equity. In my work, I focus a lot on rural health, and specifically I focus on diet and nutrition risk factors in rural communities. More and more recently, I've also been spending time thinking about cancer screening and specifically how to improve colorectal cancer screening rates and some of our federally qualified health centers across rural Southwest Virginia.

My research has a direct impact on human health. A lot of what my group does is we think about how we get evidence-based interventions or programs embedded into rural healthcare systems or rural community-based organizations like schools and Head Starts. We're actively trying to evaluate if our interventions work and what is the potential or the capacity to be able to sustain those interventions within these systems after the research is done.

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Ferris, Heather, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor, Division of Endocrinology & Metabolism, Department of Medicine

Transcript:
When patients come in to see me in clinic, I don't always have answers to their questions. What I love about my research is that I can start to answer them with some of the things that our lab and other labs have been studying. I can give them some hope that, someday, those questions might get answered.

My name is Heather Ferris, and I'm an associate professor in endocrinology and neuroscience. I take care of older adults with diabetes, and my lab is interested in how brain metabolism affects your risk for developing dementia. In particular, we’re interested in how buildup of cholesterol in the brain is a risk factor for developing dementia down the road.

When you go to your doctors, they'll often check a blood cholesterol level, and if that's elevated, they might prescribe you a medication to lower that level and reduce your risk for heart disease. It's my hope through our research that we will have a similar scenario for the brain, where you go in and have a blood test drawn, and if it's abnormal, you’re prescribed a medication to help prevent the buildup of cholesterol in your brain and improve your brain health. We're particularly excited about the new Manning Biotechnology Institute, which will be bringing together researchers in neuroscience and clinical researchers to help speed ideas like mine into clinical practice.

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Chongzhi Zang, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Genome Sciences


Transcript:
I am a computational biologist. I really love what I do because computational biology is an interdisciplinary field. One of the most exciting aspects of studying computational biology is that we can leverage knowledge and expertise from a wide range of scientific subjects, including mathematics, statistics, physics, computer science, and engineering. This is a comprehensive and unique approach that allows us to understand the fundamental mechanisms about how genes function in the genome across different biological systems and diseases.

My name is Chongzhi Zang. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Genome Sciences, and I serve as the director of computational genomics at the UVA Comprehensive Cancer Center.

My lab focuses on computational biology. We develop new quantitative models and computational methods for analyzing high throughput data from emerging genomics technologies. A better understanding of the genetic and epigenetic code, or how the human genome works, can help us comprehend the mechanisms of many diseases like cancer, and can provide insights into novel diagnostic and therapeutic developments. Advances in modern biomedical sciences, especially genomics, are driven by new biotechnologies. We use computational approaches to connect biotechnologies with biological entities, with the ultimate goal of better understanding biology. The new Manning Institute of Biotechnology will provide us with better opportunities to advance our research.

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Assistant Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Division of Neonatology

Transcript:

So I get to take care of premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit. What I really love about my research is that I get to take the data that we see at the bedside. Look at it in a different way. Test hypotheses. Build new tools. Tools that provide early warning to detect illnesses that derail normal, healthy growth and development.

My name is Brant Sullivan. I'm a neonatologist and associate professor of pediatrics. I take care of patients in the new Natal Intensive Care unit and work with a team of researchers, including data scientists, engineers, statisticians in my research and clinical care. I get to bridge what we find in the computer lab and bring it to the bedside.

In my research, we take vital sign data, analyze patterns, and then display it at the bedside as an early warning system. This information can bring information to the team that improves care and saves lives. By bringing the right people to the right bedside at the right time.

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James Zimring, MD, PhD, Professor, Department of Pathology

Transcript:
Investigating nature is basically an exploration in figuring out the workings of the world and the magic of the natural world. And so it's a great adventure and curiosity and exploration and discovery. And because it's in biomedical sciences, it's also tied to the ability to treat human disease, to mitigate suffering, and to basically improve the human condition. So those things all combined make it a wonderful thing to explore.

My name is James Zimring. I'm a professor here at the University of Virginia, and I'm a physician-scientist, meaning that I am involved in medical care and also the research of diseases and biological functions. Currently, I predominantly drive a basic research program studying blood biology,

I run a laboratory and I'm deeply invested in graduate education and making sure that the next generation of scientists gets the training and information that they need to keep the effort going in the next generation. So, we studied the biology and the diseases of red blood cells, which are the most abundant cells in the human body. And not only are they a source of disease during infections like malaria, but also they are themselves a treatment because we transfuse five million Americans a year who need those transfusions to survive, and that blood comes from altruistic donors. There are problems in the treatment of diseases of red blood cells. There are problems in giving transfusions correctly, and my lab focuses on the mechanisms by which those problems work with a goal of solving them with new technologies.

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Sameer Bajikar, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Cell Biology


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So I love being a researcher because I get to use my creativity to study the underlying biology of childhood neurodevelopmental disorders. And as part of being a researcher, I get to work as a team with other individuals to be able to design experiments and make new discoveries that can help improve the lives of these children.

My name is Samir Barakah, and I'm an assistant professor of cell biology and biomedical engineering. My lab uses a combination of cell models, animal models, and computational biology to try to understand more about the underlying mechanisms that go awry in childhood neurodevelopmental disorders.

Children with neurodevelopmental disorders like autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability have very few treatment options available to them currently. Our lab is studying these diseases using a number of different tools to help understand the underlying biology that may be going awry. And by understanding those processes, we hope to develop therapeutics and drugs that can help correct those processes and have these children lead healthier lives.

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Nassima Tiouririne, MD,
Professor, Department of Psychiatry & Neurobehavioral Sciences


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I'm particularly fascinated by the biological underpinning of addiction. What makes a drug or a behavior becomes so compulsive that it controls and destroys every aspect of someone's life. This is one of the reasons I'm interested in neuromodulation tools for the brain so that we can target deep areas of the brain and networks in the brain to better understand the disease of addiction.


Hi, my name is Nascimento Turin. I'm a professor of psychiatry here at the University of Virginia. I'm a clinician, educator and a clinical researcher. I have the privilege in being involved in a very exciting research here. So currently we are investigating the use of focus ultrasound on targeting, insular cortex in the brain to assess its role in cocaine craving with focus ultrasound and transcranial magnetic stimulation.

We're able to go deep in the brain and understand connectivity and network so we can better understand, addiction.

46 million of Americans struggle with substance use disorder, and only 6% of them are able to reach treatment that works for them. My hope is that the work that I do can improve our knowledge about brain areas and brain connectivity that are responsible for development and maintenance of addiction, so that we can develop tools to reverse these changes and free up individuals and society from this burden of addiction.

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Jay Fox, PhD, Chair, Department of Microbiology, Immunology, & Cancer Biology

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What I love about my research is that it affords me the unique opportunity to discover things that have never been known before.

My name is Jay Fox. I'm a professor of microbiology, immunology and cancer biology in the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Years ago, when I arrived at the University of Virginia, my research was focused on discovering toxins in snake venoms that give rise to the hemorrhage associated with snake bites. Since that time, we've been able to develop antibodies as well as antidotes to those toxins, and more recently, we've been involved in exploring the mechanisms of passive biology associated with the toxins in the local tissue damage.

The World Health Organization estimates approximately 130,000 people die worldwide from snake and venom. In fact, it is designated snake and venom as an elected tropical health problem. The work we do in our laboratory helps attenuate the morbidities associated with those snake and venom to minimize amputations and other effects caused by the bite.

Scott Heysell, MD, Associate Professor, Division of Infectious Diseases & International Health, Department of Medicine

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Research takes on all forms, from discovery of new knowledge to application of that knowledge to the people that need it the most. And I have the opportunity, and I'm so grateful to be able to work on different parts of that research continuum. With partners across the globe tackling infections, new infections like Covid 19 or ancient and persistent pandemics like tuberculosis.

My name is Scott Heysell and I'm an infectious diseases and internal medicine clinician. I'm the Thomas H. Hunter Professor of International Medicine, and I direct our university's center for Global Health Equity. Our work is an infection. We work in the infections of poverty like tuberculosis. Tuberculosis, for instance, is one of the leading killers from infection worldwide. So we work to develop diagnostics and therapeutics for tuberculosis to improve outcome, and do so in partnership with those communities.

Our work impacts human health for Virginians and for communities globally, such as those with whom we deeply collaborate in Tanzania, Uganda, Bangladesh. When we reduce airborne transmission from an infection like tuberculosis or reduce mortality in communities that are so economically vulnerable, we can interrupt cycles of poverty and we can rebalance instances of health inequity.

Monique Vaughan, MD, Assistant Professor, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology

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Over the last 10 to 20 years, there's been an increased emphasis on team science and biomedical research. And this really refers to the concept of creating building a unique and multidisciplinary team, where each member of the team uses his or her unique knowledge, skills and expertise to solve medical problems and improve the care we deliver to patients.

I'm Monique Vaughn, I'm an assistant professor here in the department of ObGyn at UVA, and I'm specifically a uro gynecologist and reconstructive pelvic surgeon, which means that I treat women who have pelvic floor disorders.

We know that approximately 25% of all women and 50% of women who have had children will go on to develop a pelvic floor disorder in her lifetime, such as prolapse. And we know that many of our prolapse surgeries could be improved by in terms of success and complications. And that's really what my research aims to do. And I anticipate that the new Institute of Biotechnology will serve as a hub for collaboration to help refine new therapies and prepare them for the process toward FDA approval.

Scott Hollenbeck, MD, Professor and Chair, Department of Plastic Surgery, Maxillofacial & Oral Health

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One thing I'm really excited about is our program and diseases of adipose tissue, specifically lymphedema and lipedema. These are conditions that we really don't know a whole lot about. But many patients suffer from swelling in the legs and arms and other areas. We hope to enroll patients in clinical trials here and study the tissue to be able to advance the understanding of this disease, both for our patients but also those around the country.

Hi, I'm Scott Hollenbeck and I'm the chair of the Department of plastic surgery, maxillofacial and Oral health. I'm a plastic surgeon and I primarily specialize in breast cancer reconstruction. One of the areas I focus on is free tissue transfer or free flaps, for the advanced level of reconstruction, but also focus on areas of research, including tackling disparities and access to care for patients trying to seek breast cancer reconstruction. And we offer that here at the University of Virginia, as well as a number of other sites across the state.

I think the area I'm most excited about with my research is the development of a soft tissue filler, which can be used to help patients recover from surgeries such as mastectomy and other disfiguring procedures where the material could be delivered to act as a reconstructive modality. This requires a lot of work in both the basic science area, but also in regulatory and innovation commercialization spaces, but may have a significant impact on patients health and their well-being in the future.

Kapur, Jaideep, MD, PhD, Professor, Department of Neurology

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I'm a neurologist and a neuroscientist, and I love leading a life of mind. I can explore mechanisms and treatment of seizures and epilepsy in the lab, and I can also help human beings with epilepsy, both by doing clinical trials and being in clinic.

I'm Jaideep Kapoor, MD, PhD, a clinician investigator. I'm Eugene Meyer, the third professor of neuroscience and professor of neurology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. I'm also the director of the UVA Brain Institute. I take care of patients in clinic, do research in the lab, and help individuals doing brain research across the university.

Grand mal seizures are dramatic events. Most of them end by themselves, but some of them continue and threaten the life and brain health of individuals who suffer from them. My studies in the research lab provided unique and new insights into the mechanisms of such seizures, and were lucky enough to bring those advances to human research and conduct large-scale trials to understand and treat this condition, called status epilepticus.

Melissa Little, PhD, Associate Professor Department of Public Health Sciences

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So I get really energized when I meet directly with community partners to understand how they think and feel about tobacco in their community. I really love then working with them to try to understand how we can come up with innovative solutions to address tobacco-related disparities that they see in their communities.

My name is Melissa Little, and I'm an associate professor in public health sciences and a member of the Cancer Center in the Cancer Prevention and Control Group. I also direct a center for tobacco prevention and control research, and my research really aims to address tobacco-related disparities. So, I oversee a number of NIH and state-funded grants that work directly with community partners such as rural community pharmacists, federally qualified health centers, military populations, and high schools to address tobacco use in those communities.

Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. The good news is there are some evidence-based interventions that have shown to reduce tobacco use. Unfortunately, these interventions aren't reaching all populations equally. The goal of my research is to take these evidence-based interventions and translate them to high-risk populations through innovative and sustainable approaches.

I think that if we can successfully reduce tobacco use among all populations, we can have a significant impact on improving human health.

John Bushweller, PhD, Professor Department of Molecular Physiology & Biological Physics

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The science that we do allows us to make new discoveries every day that can be understanding better the how the biology of a cancer works or developing a new agent to treat that cancer and that, those discoveries are what got me excited, every day.

Hi, I'm John Bushweller. I'm professor of molecular physiology and biological physics, as well as in the Department of Chemistry. And my lab does structural biology and chemical biology focused on transcription factor drivers and cancer.

We're developing drugs targeting transcription factors. These are proteins that regulate gene expression in the cell. They are important drivers and specific types of cancer. They were deemed very difficult targets to make drugs for by the pharmaceutical community. But we're making substantial progress. And we believe these will be paradigm-shifting in terms of therapy for these specific types of cancer.

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

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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

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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 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

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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

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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.

Transcript:

What I love about my research is a chance to uncover the basic processes that keep balances in the cells, which affects everything from how our body functions normally to how diseases develop.

My name is Shengyi Iris Sun, PhD and the Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology. Our research focuses on protein quality control process in the endoplasmic reticulum, which is an important hub for protein production in the cells.

We specifically look at how misfolded or unfolded proteins are recognized and degraded from the endoplasmic reticulum. Our goal is to understand this process in the context of liver physiology, neutron metabolism, and germline stem cell biology.

Our research have significant and direct impact on human health by understanding the basic mechanism of protein quality control, waken insights into the diverse human diseases associated with misfolded proteins such as liver diseases, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic diseases. In addition, our research enables us to identify potential therapeutic targets for future intervention.

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


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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.

Douglas Bayliss, PhD, Chair Department of Pathology


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What I love about my research with my colleagues, we really enjoy, devising and conducting experiments that reveal the underlying principles of how our complex and confusing biological systems work. And it's really gratifying when we can provide new answers into how those systems work under normal conditions and when there are problems.

My name is Doug Bayless. I'm the Joseph and Francis Lerner professor of pharmacology. Our lab is interested in the electrical and chemical signals in the brain, that control brain function, in particular in areas of the brain that regulate breathing. What we've been studying are the, changes. And in the body, how the brain senses changes in the body that reflect breathing disturbances.

And then how, those are corrected. by those same, brain regions.

Our current work is most relevant to breathing disorders, where the brain doesn't provide enough drive to the breathing systems. And some examples of that are apnea of prematurity, sudden infant death syndrome, and congenital central hyperventilation syndrome. We hope that our work, looking at the chemical and electrical signals that are used by the brain to drive breathing, will provide some new drug targets that can be used to treat patients that have those breathing disorders.