Research Groups
Faculty in the Physiology department are involved in integrative multidisciplinary research that spans multiple organ systems and diseases. One of the goals of our research is to find treatment strategies to prevent or treat diseases.
The different research groups and the associated faculty are listed below in alphabetical order
Cancer Biology
Focus: Identifying the signaling pathways that lead to the development and progression of breast cancer as well as mechanisms promoting liver cancer and cancer immunology. Faculty in this research group are also part of a broader university-wide group "Breast Cancer Signaling Network".
Cardiovascular Physiology
Focus: Identifying the signaling pathways that lead to the development and progression of breast cancer as well as mechanisms promoting liver cancer and cancer immunology. Faculty in this research group are also part of a broader university-wide group "Breast Cancer Signaling Network".
Diabetes and Obesity
Focus: Identifying how diet (high fat), diabetes, leptin, and inflammation impacts organ function directly and systemically.
Education and Human Learning
Focus: Research in teaching and learning, including studies of pedagogy and educational interventions associated with conceptual learning, affect, metacognition, equity, inclusion, and the use of technology, with a special emphasis on the learning of physiology and the physiology of learning.
Gastrointestinal Health and Disease
Focus: Gastrointestinal function and disease, including inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes, cancer, cystic fibrosis, and bile atresia; Effect of gut microbiota in the pathophysiology of disease processes.
Immunity and Tissue Inflammation
Focus: Role of innate and adaptive immune cells in disease processes; inflammatory cell signaling pathways in various tissues; role of non-immune cells in tissue inflammation and disease.
Molecular Metabolism and Disease
Focus: Understanding mechanisms accounting for disease development, progression and complications (retinopathy, osteoporosis, bone marrow pathology, artherosclerosis and neuroendocrine changes). Diabetes and Inflammatory bowel disease are focus areas.
Neuroscience
Focus: Neural regulation of organ system function, including metabolism, intestinal motility, cardiovascular system, spinal cord regeneration, glaucoma, and Parkinson’s disease.
Pathophysiology of the Skeletal System
Focus: Mechanisms of muscle and bone adaptation to disease and aging.
Pulmonary Disease
Focus: Mechanisms of acute lung injury and fibrogenesis, Asthma and corticosteroid resistance, T-cell mediated immune responses in allergic diseases.
Vision Sciences
Focus: Retinopathy, glaucoma, visual information processing.
