Featured Research

Research in our department extends across campus through interdisciplinary and inter-school collaborations.  Our faculty observe, simulate, and manipulate living systems in many length scales, from the molecular to the physiome.  They seek to understand fundamental biological processes and to translate this new knowledge to improve medicine and human health.

Translational Research: From Bench to Bedside and Back Again in Pediatric Brain Injury

Susan Margulies and her colleagues used to study a brain or lung injury in vivo in the lab and only record what happened.  If an animal stopped breathing, they observed.  If its blood pressure fell, they waited.  But clinicians who are integral members of Margulies’s research teams have changed all that. Learn more...

Can We Help to Heal Injures Without Causing Scarring?

By transplanting injured fetal sheep tendon tissue into an adult environment, Lou Soslowsky and his colleagues in the McKay Orthopaedic Research Laboratory, have astonishingly shown that tendons can heal in a scar-less, regenerative manner rather than through a scar-filled, reparative mechanism - a finding that would greatly benefit our tendons when injured.  Learn more...

Molecules that detect, monitor, and help to treat disease

On the third floor of Skirkanich Hall, Andrew Tsourkas is creating new magnetic nanoparticles that may revolutionize the detection of early cancer cells.  By "early," he means when molecular changes in the disease are occurring, but before any anatomical changes are visible.  Learn more...