Pathology Research
Research

 

Our Mission

Research areas in the Department of Pathology include cancer biology, immunopathology, human immunity and vaccine development, vector-borne infectious diseases, radiation biology and mechanisms of radioresistance, neuropathology, neurobiology of traumatic brain injury, and laboratory genomic medicine. We are proud to be among the top half of research funding among US Academic Pathology Departments at nearly $3.5 million dollars expenditures annually (2017), and we have doubled research funding compared with 2016.

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Innovation & Discoveries

Following exposure to blast traumatic brain injury (TBI), many service members developed persistent and debilitating neurobehavioral symptoms such as chronic headache, visual and balance difficulties, sleep disorder, problems concentrating and with memory, substance abuse, abrupt mood swings with periods of depression and despair, often leading to suicide.

Despite an extensive literature on a variety of animal models, almost nothing was known about the pathophysiology of blast exposure on the human brain.

Traumatic Brain Injury

Functional genome studies fail to predict cell survival after ionizing radiation, leaving the perplexing problem as to how genes control radiation resistance.

Enter Deinococcus Radiodurans and Electron Paramagnetic Resonance: a ‘Rosetta stone’ in the modern decryption of radiation resistance.

Deinococcus Radiodurans