Career Mentors
OHSU PREP career mentors include biomedical researchers and faculty who are available to provide advice and guidance to scholars interested in biomedical research careers. Career mentors help to expand the professional network PREP scholars will build while at OHSU.
Sudarshan Anand
Associate Professor | Graduate Program in Biomedical Sciences
“Giving cancer the flu” Strategies to manipulate the tumor immune microenvironment including antibodies targeting immune checkpoints have revolutionized cancer treatment. However, many tumors are immunologically ‘cold’ thereby escaping these immunotherapies. ‘Tricks and tips’ from viruses/bacteria or autoimmune disease have yielded many approaches to enhance immune recognition of tumors. We found that an RNA sensing pathway, Retinoic acid Induced Gene 1 (RIG-I) that serves as a receptor for viral RNA, can be adopted as a robust immune activator across cancer types A few questions we are investigating currently What cell types in the tumor benefit from RIG activation - the tumor cells or immune cells? What makes some tumors sensitive or resistant to RIG activation? Can we develop small molecule modulators of RIG-I function? Lab Website
Steven Bedrick
Associate Professor | Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology
I study ways to apply natural language processing techniques to a variety of biomedical problems, including clinical information retrieval, secondary analysis of electronic medical record data, and automatic assessment of neuropsychological disorders. My current projects include an automated tool for analyzing medical articles for use in systematic reviews, a novel communication platform for individuals with primary progressive aphasia, and an ongoing study of the linguistic patterns of children with autism.
Daniel Lopez
Postdoctoral Researcher | Department of Psychiatry
Daniel A. Lopez is a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Bonnie Nagel’s Developmental Brain Imaging Lab in the Department of Psychiatry and an IRACDA at OHSU scholar. Daniel completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of California-Los Angeles. He holds a master’s degree in public health from the City University of New York and a Master of Arts from Stanford University. He completed his Ph.D. in Epidemiology in 2023 at the University of Rochester. Prior to joining the Epidemiology PhD program, he worked with the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos. His graduate research focused on reward processing and cognitive development in adolescents. As a postdoc, Daniel will continue his work analyzing longitudinal trajectories of cognitive development in adolescents.
Lisa Vrooman
Assistant Professor | Program in Biomedical Sciences
Over 8 million babies have been born using Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), and use will continue to increase as access becomes more available and technology/protocols improve the probability of a live birth. In the United States, approximately 2% of live births are conceived using ART. ART pregnancies are associated with increased risk for low birth weight, abnormal placentation, congenital defects, preterm delivery, preeclampsia, and other pregnancy complications. ART-conceived people are also a relatively young population—there is limited existing data examining how ART impacts health at middle or old age. Aligned with this clinically-relevant gap in knowledge, the Vrooman lab focuses on understanding and improving the molecular, cellular, and long-term health outcomes of current and future ART procedures. A priority research question is determining how exposures during critical windows of development, like ART, can contribute to pregnancy/neonatal complications, and even lead to pathological states later in adulthood. The Vrooman lab leverages the power of the mouse and non-human primate models to conduct translational research with the goal of optimizing protocols and testing interventions to improve maternal and fetal outcomes.
Gary Westbrook
Professor | Neuroscience Graduate Program
Researchers in the Westbrook Lab would like to understand how synapses and small circuits do their work. Our earlier work was mostly directed at the level of receptors, particularly N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors, and the function of single synapses. Our efforts have now largely shifted to studies of small networks (microcircuits) in the hippocampus. Our goal is to understand how such circuits are formed, regulate their activity and contribute to the function of neural systems. Lab Website