Martha Carvour, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine-Infectious Diseases
Martha Carvour is an Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and Epidemiology in the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine and College of Public Health. Dr. Carvour is an equity-focused epidemiologist and a practicing infectious diseases physician. Her research focuses on the advancement of health equity for patients affected by diabetes-related foot conditions and, more recently, COVID-19, by combining rigorous epidemiological methods with community-engaged and patient-centered research. She is also the project lead for the University of Iowa Public-Private Partnership (P3)-funded Equity in Health Science and Practice initiative.
Chooza Moon, PhD, RN
Assistant Professor of Nursing
Chooza Moon is investigating the consequences of sleep and circadian rhythms in individuals with ischemic heart disease and heart failure, as well as sleep/circadian rhythm and brain health in general aging. Her earlier research focused on how sleep and multimorbidities are associated with cognition and brain health in heart failure. She currently leads a team focusing on aging, sleep, and circadian rhythm in patients with coronary heart disease in collaboration with interdisciplinary scholars. Internal funding supported these projects, and she was recently awarded a 3-year research grant from the Alzheimer’s Association to study the associations between circadian rhythm and neuroimaging data in older adults. Her long-term goal is to develop interventions to impede and alleviate cognitive impairment in people who are at risk for Alzheimer's disease and related dementia.
Jacob Simmering, PhD
Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine-Pulmonary, Critical Care and Occupational Medicine
Xiaoyang Hua, MD
Assistant Professor of Otolaryngology
As an otolaryngologist/rhinologist, Dr. Hua is interested in how the nose and upper airway regulates the immune response in the lungs. His lab has recently shown that activation of the nasal mucosal immune system can remotely enhance both innate and adaptive immunity in the lungs. The long-term goal is to further define the immune mechanisms that connect the nose and lungs, and to develop new preventive and therapeutic strategies to treat lung diseases, including nasal vaccine development.
Past scholars since 2018
Marco Hefti, MD
Assistant Professor of Pathology
Board-certified neuropathologist
Hefti is interested in the role of the tau protein in neonatal hypoxic ischemic injury, especially in children with congenital cardiac malformation, with a long-term goal of developing better biomarkers for neurodevelopmental outcomes that can facilitate clinical trials of neuroprotective strategies and help guide treatment. He will apply data from human tissue-based studies of tau splicing and post-translational modification to the identification of novel early biomarkers for neurologic outcomes in hypoxic-ischemic injury.
Bradley H. Rosen, DO
Associate of Internal Medicine-Pulmonary
Associate of Anatomy & Cell Biology
Rosen focuses on the interactions between mucus and inflammation to better understand the pathogenesis of cystic fibrosis (CF) and other mucoinflammatory lung diseases. As a pulmonologist, he will use bronchoscopy, lung imaging, and pulmonary function tests to investigate lung disease in novel transgenic ferret models to test the hypothesis that inflammatory CF lung disease develops due to altered mucus properties. This in vivo work is combined with a flexible Cas9-gene editing approach in primary airway cell cultures to dissect the molecular pathways involved in mucus-initiated inflammation. These findings will inform how mucoinflammatory lung diseases such as CF, asthma, and chronic bronchitis are understood and treated.
Jordan Schultz, PharmD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Schultz aims to better understand the biological mechanisms underlying Huntington’s Disease (HD) with a long-term goal of identifying potential new therapeutic targets. He will conduct a neuroimaging study of patients with pre-manifest Huntington Disease (HD) and controls to test whether patients with HD have centrally-mediated dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system that may affect the cerebrovascular system. Specifically, he will investigate potential signaling abnormalities, decreased arterial diameters, and changes in brain oxygen levels in patients with HD with the aim of identifying therapeutic drugs to prevent or delay HD symptoms.
Ryan Smith, PhD
Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Experimental Therapeutics
Smith focuses on translating genetic risk factors into therapeutic hypotheses for addiction disorders, with a long-term goal to identify biomarkers that can inform treatment choices and the development of new therapeutics for substance abuse. He will use post-mortem human tissue and immortalized cell lines to look at genetic variants in the serotonin 2A receptor that confer risk for addiction.
Cristina Vidal, DDS, MS, PhD
Assistant Professor of Operative Dentistry
Vidal is interested in the tooth breakdown mediated by the interaction of the microbiome with host mechanisms in caries lesion progression. Her long-term goal is to develop reparative and preventive dental therapies that promote dentin and pulp healing orchestrated by tissue’s components. This in vitro work will characterize the modulation of the expression and activity of host endogenous proteases by the complex oral microbiome in dentin caries lesions that could change completely the traditional concept of caries etiology and open new possibilities for dental research and patient care. Using extracted carious teeth, odontoblast-like cells, and cariogenic bacteria, she will conduct studies to: 1) clarify the unique contributions of matrix metalloproteases (MMPs) to the different stages of caries progression, 2) reveal the specific role of MMPs in dentin degradation or in reparative processes, and 3) characterize interactions between the dentin organic matrix components and odontoblasts with bacterial metabolites that modulate MMPs expression and activation.
Aaron Seaman, PhD
Associate of Internal Medicine - General Internal Medicine
Seaman is a medical anthropologist and health services researcher who seeks to develop, implement, and evaluate research-driven interventions aimed at improving care delivery for older, rural adults living with a cancer history. He will conduct a mixed-methods study in order to 1) identify factors associated with head and neck cancer survivors’ service utilization, especially emergency and hospital services; quality of life; and health outcomes; and 2) determine survivorship care priorities and preferences for patient, caregiver, and clinical stakeholders involved in head and neck survivorship care. Along with the study’s data, he will develop a stakeholder advisory group which will be instrumental in the subsequent development of an intervention to facilitate head and neck cancer survivorship care delivery and coordination for rural patients.
Aislinn Williams, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Aislinn Williams is interested in understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms by which genetic risk factors contribute to psychiatric disease. She will investigate the role of a specific psychiatric risk gene, CACNA1C, in the development and function of the cerebellum, a brain region involved in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. She will use transgenic mice and human stem cells derived from patients with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia to understand how genetic variation in CACNA1C affects cerebellar neuron function, gene expression, and behavior.