Research Interest: Human Subjects Research
Name | PhD Program | Research Interest | Publications |
---|---|---|
Free, Meghan WEBSITE PUBLICATIONS |
PHD PROGRAM RESEARCH INTEREST |
My research focuses on understanding the immunological underpinnings of autoimmune disease, specifically anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibody (ANCA) vasculitis. We examine CD4+ T cells in the context of disease onset, remission, relapse, and long-term remission off therapy. By studying both autoreactive T cells and regulatory T cells, we aim to create biomarkers of disease activity and potential new targets for immunotherapy. |
Yap, Pew-Thian WEBSITE PUBLICATIONS |
PHD PROGRAM RESEARCH INTEREST |
Dr. Pew-Thian Yap is a Professor of the Department of Radiology and the Director of the Image Analysis Core of the Biomedical Research Imaging Center (BRIC) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He leads a wide range of research spanning image acquisition, reconstruction, quality control, harmonization, processing, and analysis with applications in neuroscience, disease diagnosis, and surgical planning. |
Yadav, Amol WEBSITE PUBLICATIONS |
PHD PROGRAM RESEARCH INTEREST |
The Brain-Spine-Machine Interfaces Lab directed by Dr. Amol Yadav works at the interface of Neuroscience and Engineering. The lab’s goal is to develop neural engineering-based therapies to treat neurological disorders and understand how disorders and injuries impact the brain-spine network and its role in sensorimotor control. The lab specializes in spinal cord stimulation, high-density neural recording, computational modeling, behavioral experimentation in rodents, and human pilot studies with invasive neural interface technologies. |
Haendel, Melissa WEBSITE PUBLICATIONS |
PHD PROGRAM RESEARCH INTEREST |
The Translational and Integrative Sciences Laboratory (TISLab) aims to weave together healthcare systems, basic science research, and patient generated data through development of data integration technologies and innovative data capture strategies. Our research focuses on the development of semantic technologies for data harmonization and analytics, such as ontologies, knowledge graphs, and data models. We leverage these semantic resources to standardize phenotypic information coming from clinical encounters, model and veterinary species, and directly from patients. As part of a longstanding international consortium called the Monarch Initiative, we utilize structured phenotype data to integrate of genotype-phenotype data across species to improve rare disease diagnosis, mechanism discovery, and to identify treatments. We work with a number of rare disease communities around the world with the goal of making our data standards available for everyone and translated into different languages so that everyone can have access to the same knowledge and have the same chance for a diagnosis. We are passionate about environmental health and understanding new ways of making environmental and nutrition data computable alongside clinical data. For example, we have integrated patient nutrition survey data together with basic research knowledge to reveal dietary risk factors of women’s reproductive disorders. We recently obtained funding to create an atlas for toxicological experiments and phenotypic outcomes in the zebrafish. TISLab has also recently created a veterinary One Health program, which focuses on understanding health influences affecting veterinary species together with their pet parents. During Covid, we led a national initiative to harmonize Electronic Health Record data to aid discovery analytics, called the National Covid Cohort Collaborative (N3C). The N3C is now the largest publicly available HIPAA-limited dataset in US history, and has ~5,000 users. We have studied long-Covid, advised the White House and governor’s offices, and have won the NIH/FASEB DataWorks! Grand prize for our work on N3C. We also lead the Center for Linkage and Aquisition of Data (CLAD) for the All of Us Research Program. The CLAD aims to link passive data streams such as insurance claims, mortality, and environmental data to program participants to provide a more comprehensive picture of their health trajectories. We have produced several global standards, such as the Human Phenotype Ontology, Phenopackets (Global Alliance for Genomics and Health and ISO certified), Mondo, and LinkML. We regularly attend the American Medical Informatics Association, the American Association of Human Genetics, the International Biocuration Society, and the Bioinformatics Open Source at ISMB conferences. TISLab members come from a wide variety of of scientific backgrounds and interests, making us effective partners in translational science and collaborative analytics. |
Hwang, Janice PUBLICATIONS |
PHD PROGRAM RESEARCH INTEREST |
My group is interested in understanding the effects of obesity and diabetes on the brain, particularly related to cerebral function and energetics. We conduct physiology based, mechanistic human and rodent studies to investigate fundamental questions such as how does the brain sense various nutrients (sugar, fat, etc), how does metabolic disease, sleep, aging impact brain function and metabolism? Using classic human metabolic techniques including hyperinsulinemic and hyper/hypoglycemic clamps coupled with advanced neuroimaging modalities including 1H and 13C magnetic resonance spectroscopy, functional MRI, and PET-CT imaging, my group has shown that glucose transport capacity into the human brain can be modified by factors such as obesity and insulin resistance as well as hyperglycemia, hypoglycemia and glycemic variability. We also have interests in using novel human imaging modalities to understand how obesity and diabetes impact neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration. |
Good, Misty WEBSITE PUBLICATIONS |
PHD PROGRAM RESEARCH INTEREST |
The Good Laboratory is focused on the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in the pathogenesis of a devastating intestinal disease primarily affecting premature infants called necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC). The long-term goal of the Good Lab is to understand the signaling pathways regulating the uncontrolled immune response in NEC and how these responses can be prevented through dietary modifications or targeted intestinal epithelial therapies. Her basic and translational research utilizes a bench-to-bedside approach with multiple cutting-edge techniques. In her pre-clinical studies, their team utilizes a humanized neonatal mouse model of NEC to understand the signaling pathways and immune cell responses involved in NEC development. Specifically, the laboratory interrogates ways to modulate the immune response, epithelial cell and stem cell regeneration as well as early microbial colonization during NEC. In the clinical component of her research program, Dr. Good leads a large multi-center NEC biorepository for the dedicated pursuit of molecular indicators of disease and to gain greater pathophysiologic insights during NEC in humans. Dr. Good also developed a premature infant intestine-on-a-chip model to study NEC and provide a personalized medicine approach to test new therapeutics. Her laboratory is currently funded with multiple NIH R01 grants and has previously received K08 and R03 funding as well as awards from the March of Dimes, the Gerber Foundation and the NEC Society. |