Biography

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
I have three goals as a teacher of undergraduate and graduate students. First, I try to help them succeed at the college level in a general sense. Secondly, I hope to convey the importance of scientific understanding as part of citizenship, and the acquisition and sharing of knowledge as a form of social responsibility. Finally, I hope to inspire and prepare at least some of them to thrive in a scientific career, whether that means working as technicians in industry, as policymakers, as researchers in academia, or whatever they become.
To achieve these goals, I?m using active learning pedagogies to foster student?s success. My lectures are interactive and complemented with in-class POGIL and Case Study activities.

RESEARCH INTEREST
With my research students, we are excited about learning and investigating how cell migration affects normal and pathological conditions in the human body. We are particularly interested in deciphering the molecular mechanisms of the resolution of inflammation.
This is an important topic because un-proper resolution of inflammation or unresolved inflammation is involved in the onset or aggravation of the two major diseases in developed country: Cardiovascular diseases and Cancer.
During my postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I showed for the first time that macrophages contribute to the resolution of inflammation by inducing neutrophil reverse migration.
At UVU, we want now to complement this striking observation by the depiction of the molecular mechanism causing the reverse migration of neutrophils using genetic approach in zebrafish and in vitro cell migration assays.

Teaching