Faculty

Kaposi’s sarcoma-associate herpesvirus (KSHV), AIDS-related malignancies, Cancer metabolism, Angiogenesis, Innate immunity, Microbiota, microRNAs, Genomics Epigenetics, RNA epigenetics, high-throughput screening (drug and genomic), systems biology

The current focus of Dr. Gelhaus' research is on the mechanism of these electrophilic fatty acids in asthma. Asthma is a complicated disease that much like cancer is comprised of numerous disease states and phenotypes.

Genetics of aging, reproduction, lipid metabolism, immunity, protein homeostasis, age-related disease biology   

Dr. Ghuman’s research focuses on how our brain turns what falls upon our eyes into the rich meaningful experience that we perceive in the world around us. Specifically, his lab studies the neural basis of the visual perception of objects, faces, words, and social and affective visual images in the real-world.

Neural circuits in the basal ganglia involved in motor control and disease 

Pain continues to be a major health problem with tremendous financial, social and psychological costs. Conservative estimates put the cost of pain to the US economy well into the hundreds of billions of dollars per year as a result of associated medical expenses and lost wages with a significant minority of Americans suffering from persistent or recurrent pain syndromes throughout the most productive years of their lives. Just one pain syndrome, migraine headache, directly impacts 20% of the adult population. Yet, there remain few if any effective therapies devoid of serious side effects that are currently available to treat pain, particularly persistent or recurrent pain associated with syndromes.

The clinical features of a number of pain syndromes serve as the organizing focus of research in the Gold laboratory. These observations include the following: 1) many pain syndromes are unique to a particular part of the body such as the head in migraine, the temporomandibular joint in temporomandibular disorder (TMD), or the colon in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD); 2) many pain syndromes such as migraine, TMD and IBD occur with a greater prevalence, severity and/or duration in women than in men; 3) many pain syndromes are associated with changes in the excitability of primary afferent neurons; 4) there are time-dependent changes in the mechanisms underlying pain syndromes; and 5) the type of injury, (i.e., inflammation or nerve injury), are differentially sensitive to therapeutic interventions. These observations led to specific hypotheses that are tested in ongoing studies in the Gold laboratory. These include 1) characterizing the mechanisms underlying inflammation-induced changes in the evoked Ca2+ transients in sensory neurons, 2) characterizing the mechanisms underlying the initiation of migraine attacks, 3) characterizing the influence of estrogen on the excitability of spinal and trigeminal ganglion neurons, 4) characterizing the role of changes in inhibitory receptors, in particular GABA, in injury-induced increases in sensitivity, and 5) identification of ways to maximize the therapeutic utility of local anesthetics. The ultimate goal of these studies is to identify novel targets for the development of therapeutic interventions for the treatment of pain.

Neurophysiology of basal ganglia system related to psychiatric disorders.

Combining NMR spectroscopy w/Biophysics, Biochem&Chem to investigate cellular processes at the molecular & atomic levels in relation to human disease 

Our research focuses on vertebrate eye development, disease modeling and regeneration utilizing the zebrafish as a model system.