PROMOTIONS

Daniela Valdez-Jasso, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Bioengineering

DVJ Research Lab : The DVJ Lab investigates the mechanics and mechanobiology of the heart and arteries of the lungs during the progression of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a life-threatening disease that can strike in early adulthood, is more prevalent in women, and has no cure.

The DVJ research team uses in-vivo, ex-vivo, in-vitro and in-silico studies of the heart and pulmonary vasculature at the organ, tissue, and cell scales to identify mechanisms of pathological dysfunction and remodeling. We have expertise in animal models of PAH, in-vivo physiology, soft-tissue biomechanics, immunohistochemistry and quantitative microscopy, cell mechanobiology and multi-scale mathematical and computational modeling. This comprehensive, integrative, and multi-scale approach is elucidating the biological principles of pulmonary vascular and right ventricular remodeling in PAH and their molecular mechanisms, while accounting for the major differences between sexes in the prevalence and natural history of PAH.

Prashant Mali, Ph.D.

Professor of Bioengineering

Mali Research Lab: Understanding and progressively engineering biology towards enabling gene & cell based human therapeutics.

The major research thrusts in the laboratory are two-fold: one, development of molecular toolsets for genome, transcriptome, and proteome engineering and their application to systematic genome interpretation and gene therapy applications; and two, study and engineering of cell fate specification during development utilizing human pluripotent stem cells as the core model system. Given the parallels in phenotypes (such as self-renewal and tumor forming ability) between pluripotent stem cells and cancer cells, a key research thrust is also in dissecting aberrant cellular transformation processes such as during tumorigenesis.

Our research approach is curiosity-driven, integrating core expertise in genome engineering and stem cell engineering, with synthetic biology and materials science, and we are passionate about understanding and progressively engineering biology towards enabling gene & cell based human therapeutics.