Assistant Professor

Neurosurgery

Principal Investigator Brain and Spinal Injury Center

University of California, San Francisco (San Francisco, CA)

Visiting scholar

Neuroscience

The Ohio State University College of Medicine (Columbus, OH)

My primary interests lie in spinal cord injury (SCI), with a focus on spinal cord plasticity/spinal learning, cell death, as well as neuroinformatics and statistical approaches for improved translational testing of SCI therapeutics.

I have 3 major lines of research: 1.) Unraveling the mechanisms of cell death after spinal cord injury with a particular focus on interactions between the proinflammatory cytokine tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNFa) and glutamatergic systems. These projects have the major goal of developing novel therapeutic interventions for treating spinal cord injury. 2.) Using formal spinal learning paradigms to study the cellular mechanisms of spinal cord plasticity and spinal learning, with the goal of improving the capacity for neurorehabilitation after spinal cord injury. 3.) Applying data-driven and statistical modeling approaches to formally define spinal cord injury as a multivariate syndrome that has common feature patterns across species. This approach seeks to provide new tools for improved translational testing of SCI.

2009 Chair, Society for Neuroscience Nanosymposium "Spinal Cord Injury: Beyond Biology to Therapy"

2007 Michael Goldberger Prize, National Neurotrauma Society

2007-2010 NIH Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship (NRSA)

2004 Texas A&M University Distinguished Graduate Student Doctoral Research Award

2002 Society for Neuroscience/Eli Lilly Graduate Student Travel Award

2000 Phi Kappa Phi

2000 Texas A&M University Thesis Minigrant

1996 Psi Chi