Cerebral Malaria (CM) is an encephalopathy that causes an estimated 343,000 yearly deaths as a result of Plasmodium falciparum infection. Survivors experience long-term neurological sequelae. Cerebral vascular dysfunction is well documented on autopsy of CM patients. Signs include congestion of cerebral blood vessels, adhesion of both parasites and leukocytes to the vascular endothelium, and thrombi in all verified CM patients.

Kawasaki disease is a common infectious disease of childhood, whose after-effects cause lifelong damage to the heart. In the developed world, it is the leading cause of acquired heart disease in children, outpacing rheumatic heart disease for the last several decades. Many children with Kawasaki disease require life-long medications to prevent complications of the disease, as well as frequent and intensive follow up with cardiologists. Rates of interventional procedures and adverse events later in life can be very high.

Basic Research

Project summary: Fluency in early math concepts, like simple multiplication (e.g., 2x4=8), predicts success in math through high school. Children who do not make the critical transition from calculating arithmetic problems to remembering them as math facts show lower success in school and ultimately poorer quality of life. Models of monolingual arithmetic argue that these arithmetic facts are encoded in verbal memory, making them part of the language system. In turn, bilinguals may only be able to access these facts in the language in which the facts were learned.

A distinguishing trait of heme enzymes is that a high-valent iron-oxo species is the common oxidant for mediating a remarkable array of oxidation reactions. However, the conundrum is that each enzyme in general only promotes a specific type of reaction. How the reaction type is determined after formation of the key oxidant remains to be an unsolved question. Answers to this question have implications for our fundamental understanding of enzyme catalysis as well as de novo enzyme design and protein engineering.

Overview. Articular cartilage, a connective tissue lining articulating joints, has a highly ordered structure

Human Papillomavirus (HPV) infections and associated diseases have been a chronic and growing health problem for the worlds population. HPV is now recognized as the carcinogen of almost all invasive cervical cancers and a major cause of other human malignancies including oropharyngeal and anogenital cancers totaling ~ 600,000 cases worldwide annually. Economically, HPV imparts a tremendous financial burden on the world health systems in terms of expenditure for HPV prevention, periodic surveillance and cancer treatments.

The prevalence of childhood obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and cardiovascular disease is increasing at alarming rates. Recent studies suggest that unfavorable gut microbiota and chronic low-grade inflammation in obese mothers before pregnancy, during gestation and lactation may link to metabolic diseases in offspring. Colonization of gastrointestinal tract starts as early as in utero, which implicates that offspring born form obese mothers have different bacterial population that may be prone to obese in later life.

The proposed research direction is the manufacture and characterization of implantable, biodegradable polymer structures with engineered release profiles of drug payloads. These structures can be 3D printed in-house with complex geometries and composite structures, which we hypothesize will dissolve such that selective timing or staged release of one or more compounds is possible. While typically such payloads would be therapeutic in action, this platform technology is drug agnostic and can be used for image enhancement or theranostic applications as well.

This collaborative research project will further evaluate whether intrinsic alterations in these signaling pathways are biomarkers of drug response and. reciprocally. follow up on data indicating that the taccas can also alter the functional consequences of these signaling pathways. These studies are significant in that they will lead. in the future.