I am an Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Arizona. I am also an active member of the Asthma and Airway Disease Research Center and the BIO5 Institute and have faculty appointments in the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in the Physiological Sciences and in the Allergy and Immunology Fellowship Training program. I serve as co-director of the Lung Research Focus group (RGF2) within the Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center. I have over a decade’s worth of experience mentoring and training medical students, graduate students, postdocs and fellows. In addition, I participate as a faculty member and served on the curriculum committee for the Eureka Institute Virtual School, an international certificate program in translational research, and I serve as the leader for the University of Arizona College of Medicine hub. My own translational research investigates obstructive lung disease and dysfunction of innate immunity in Asthma and respiratory infections. I have led pulmonary function tests with collaborators for the past 10 years and have a strong history of collaborations in the fields of respiratory diseases, lung function and asthma.
Our current work involves studies of pulmonary surfactant protein-A (SP-A), surfactant lipids, and club cell secretory protein (CC16) and how they participate in pulmonary diseases and immune system regulation. With a special emphasis on lung infections and asthma, we use a combination of animal modeling and human cells to better understand the roles of these endogenous lung proteins to overall host defense and lung homeostasis.
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