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All-Star Faculty

USTAR provides funding to recruit all-star research leadership to the University of Utah and Utah State University within strategically targeted innovation areas. These highly talented and respected researchers have vast experience raising millions of dollars in research funding, building world-class research teams, and forming new ventures based off their respective technologies.

Utah State University

 

University of Utah





Allen Howard, Ph.D., Center for Active Sensing and Imaging (CASI)Howard
Allen Howard is a USTAR Professor in the Department of Physics at Utah State University. He also is a member of the technical staff at Dugway Proving Ground (DPG), where he manages a DPG-USU student co-op program. His research interests include optical remote sensing, geophysical applications of electromagnetic theory, applied mathematics, and signal processing. This work resulted in many technical publications and presentations, two U.S. patents, and the award of IEEE Fellow. More recently, he has worked on optical methods to retrieve aerosol properties from active and passive sensors in the lower atmosphere.  

Mr. Howard has served as professor of geophysics at the Universidade do Pará and the Universidade Estadual do Norte Fluminense, both in Brazil. He also taught in the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Arizona and more recently in the Physics Department at Utah State University. In 1995, he founded Terragraf, a high-resolution subsurface imaging company. Mr. Howard has done extensive consulting; the organizations for which he has consulted include: Standard Oil, British Petroleum, Los Alamos Labs, and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

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Michael Lefevre, Ph.D., Center for Advanced NutritionLefevre
Michael Lefevre arrived as a USTAR professor at USU’s Center for Advanced Nutrition in September of 2007, from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana where he served as Chief of the Division of Functional Foods Research, as well as professor in the Division of Nutrition and Chronic Diseases.  He was also an adjunct professor at the School of Human Ecology at Louisiana State University.

Lefevre is a fellow of the American Heart Association, belonging to the Council on Arteriosclerosis;  the Council on Nutrition, Metabolism and Physical Activity; the Council on Epidemiology and Prevention; and is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute of Food Technology.  He earned his doctorate in nutrition with a minor in physiological sciences from the University of California Davis. Lefevre brings significant experience in the role that nutrition plays in cardiovascular disease.
After receiving his Ph.D. in Nutrition from the University of California at Davis, Dr. Lefevre joined the research group of Dr. Paul Roheim in 1984 at Louisiana State University Medical Center. During that time, Dr. Lefevre pursued studies on the basic mechanism by which high density lipoproteins protect against heart disease by removing cholesterol from cells.

In 1990, Dr. Lefevre joined the faculty at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center. His research interests moved into the direction of dietary effects on risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Under his direction, the Pennington Biomedical Research Center was selected as one of four research centers to conduct a pioneering multicenter study on the effects of diet on lipoprotein and thrombogenic risk factors.   Dairy Management, Inc., established a Dairy Institute at the Pennington Center under Dr. Lefevre’s direction in 1994 to examine the interactions between diet and genetics.  More recently, Dr. Lefevre received a grant from NIH to identify genetic and non-genetic factors which affect the magnitude of cardiovascular disease risk factor response to heart healthy diets in African American families.  Additionally, Dr. Lefevre is Co-Director and a Project leader at the Center for the Study of Botanicals and Metabolic Syndrome where he studies the effects of anthocyanins on features of metabolic syndrome.

Dr. Lefevre’s current research interests reach into several specific areas of investigation including: 1) defining the impact of dietary constituents, and in particular, dietary fatty acid content and composition, on risk factors for coronary artery disease (CAD), with a specific emphasis on lipid and lipoprotein risk factors; 2) studying the effects of alternate dietary approaches to reduce CAD risk; 3) identifying genetic, anthropometric, and other factors which contribute to the substantial variations in CAD risk factor response to dietary manipulation; and 4) examining the effects of phytochemical dietary components on health.

Dr. Lefevre  currently serves as a member of the American Heart Association’s Nutrition Committee.  Additionally he is member of Kraft’s Worldwide Health and Advisory Council and a scientific advisor to ILSI North America’s Food, Nutrition and Safety Program and Technical Committee on Fatty Acids.

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Jeff Muhs, BiofuelsMuhs
Jeff Muhs was raised in the farming community of Noble, IL, where he helped his father farm and build houses. After receiving an A.S. from Vincennes University in 1984 and a B.S. in Electro-Optics from the University of Houston in 1986, Jeff was employed by Amphenol Fiber Optic Products where he developed multimode fiber optic couplers used in local area networks.  He joined the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1988 as a research scientist.  During his early years at ORNL, Jeff developed several fiber optic sensors and electro-optic components used in transportation, energy, health-care, and national security applications.   For his pioneering research, he was named ORNL's Engineer of the Year in 1997.  In 1998, Jeff began developing hybrid solar lighting systems - a novel method of collecting and distributing sunlight through optical fibers to reduce electricity use and improve lighting quality in buildings.  Mr. Muhs organized a research consortium of 20 public and private entities including Fortune 500 companies, electric utilities and several universities.   He was awarded an R&D 100 Award and a National Federal Laboratory Consortium Excellence in Technology Transfer Award after successfully developing and transferring this technology to the private sector.  He was also named ORNL's Science Communicator of the Year in 2004.

In 2005, Jeff worked in Washington, D.C., where he served as U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander's science and energy policy advisor.  He developed numerous provisions included in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and led staff-level efforts on what later became President Bush's American Competitiveness Initiative and the America COMPETES Act signed into law earlier this year.  In 2006, Jeff returned to ORNL to head strategic planning for the Engineering Science and Technology Division (ESTD) and joined an ORNL spin-out company - Sunlight Direct, Inc. - as Vice President of Research.   In 2007, he also served as ESTD's Acting Division Director.

Jeff has authored 14 patents along with several dozen technical publications and magazine articles.  Three of his patents have been licensed to industry and are now generating royalty streams.  His work has been featured in several prominent scientific periodicals and on national and international television networks.

In his private life, Jeff enjoys traveling, camping, hiking, and snow-skiing with his wife, Lori, and their sons, Ethan and John.  He also enjoys winter backpacking in the mountains, playing his guitar, writing songs, and small group spiritual discussions.

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Sridhar Viamajala, BiofuelsSridhar
Sridhar Viamajala is an Assistant Professor in Biological and Irrigation Engineering at Utah State University. His research interests are in the areas of bioprocess engineering for production of biofuels. Specifically, he is involved in research to produce biodiesel from algae, biogas from animal waste and ethanol from agricultural residues and other lignocellulosic materials. He is also involved in projects related to removal of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) from animal and municipal waste streams using bacteria and algae. As a process engineer, his expertise is in kinetics of biological reactions, reactor design, scale-up and downstream processing. 

Sridhar received his Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur, India) in 1997. Thereafter, he worked at an oil refinery in India for a year before starting graduate studies at Washington State University. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 2003. Thereafter he worked at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden (Colorado) on projects related to biochemical processes for production of biofuels.

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David Ward, Ph.D., Center for Advanced NutritionWArd
David C. Ward is a USTAR professor in the Center for Advanced Nutrition. He appointed as the Deputy Director of the Nevada Cancer Institute in May of 2004. As the deputy director, Dr. Ward will work closely with Dr. Nicholas Vogelzang, the Director NVCI, to coordinate the institute's scientific research efforts in Basic Translational research, Population Science and Drug Development. Dr. Ward is internatinoally recognized for his pioneering research in the fields of molecular cytogenetics, cancer genetics, virology and optical imaging technology. He has received numerous awards, both natinoally and internationally, including electino to the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. He has co-authored over 300 scientific publications and has served on grant review panels in the US, Canda and England for many years. Dr. Ward is also co-founded five biotechnolgoy companies, three of which are publicly traded on national stock exchanges.

Dr. Ward earned his B.S. in Microbiology from Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada; M.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver; and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Rockefeller University, New York. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, England, Dr. Ward joined the faculty of Yale University School of Medicine in 1971, where he remained in the Departments of Genetics and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry until his recruitment to NVCI. Specializing in the development of new technologies and the application of new technologies to human health, Dr. Ward will lead projects focused on genetics, proteomics and imaging. The genetics and proteomics projects will be carried out in collaboration with his wife, Dr. Patricia Bray-Ward as well as with other investigators at the NVCI. Genetics projects will include the study of cancer mutations and genetic epidemiology as it relates to the incidence of cancer, genetic predisposition to cancer, and patient response to cancer therapy protocols. Proteomics is focused on the discovery of serum biomarkers for various cancers and chemotherapeutic response serum biomarkers. In addition, Dr. Ward has a strong interest in the development and application of thermal and infrared imaging technologies for cancer imaging.

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David York, Ph.D., Center for Advanced Nutrition, USU York photo

Dr. David A. York was selected by USTAR to serve as the Director for the Center for Advanced Nutrition.  Dr. York is responsible for establishing a center where current and future USU research scientists will collaborate to accelerate existing strengths in the area of nutrition research with an emphasis on technological development and commercialization.

Dr. York has a distinguished reputation in the field of nutrition and obesity. A native of England, York earned his doctorate in physiology from the University of Southampton. He conducted postdoctoral research at the Medical Center Hospital in Boston, Mass., and the UCLA School of Medicine. He then moved back to Southampton University Medical School, where he was on the faculty for 18 years before joining the Louisiana State University System, serving primarily at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center as the Chief of Basic Science Research and the head of the Experimental Obesity Research Group.  During his tenure at PBRC, York played a pivotal role in increasing the annual budget to more than $50 million and growing the staff from about 35 in 1989 to a current workforce of 600.

Dr. York has presented or chaired at more than 100 major conferences and symposia, and he has received more than $20 million in research grants. York’s research interests include animal models of obesity, mechanisms that control food intake and nutrient selection, the molecular basis for the beneficial effects of exercise in preventing neurodegenerative disorders, and the hormone dependence of animal obesity. Dr York has filed 3 patent applications in relation to his work with the peptide enterostatin.

York’s research approach centers on understanding nutrition from the whole animal down to the individual genes or molecular events that enable the nutritional response. While today’s environment in which we live is conducive to the development of obesity - a top public health concern- and other chronic diseases, understanding the mechanisms and the reasons for individual differences in susceptibility will provide us needed insight into the role of nutrition in health and disease. He hopes to develop USU’s Center for Advanced Nutrition into a research center that has national and international recognition for its research in this field.

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Cameron Charles, Ph.D., Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering, U. of U.
Charles photo

Dr. Cameron Charles was born in Toronto, Canada, and from a young age was drawn to engineering and technology due to the exciting, fast-changing nature of the field.  He attended the University of Waterloo from 1996-2001, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering and completed several internships at companies ranging from a silicon valley start-up (Nuvation Labs, since acquired by IAR Systems Firmware) to established companies such as PMC-Sierra.  He first came to the University of mail

Utah in 2001 to attend graduate school, and completed a Master of Science degree of Electrical Engineering in 2003.  He then moved on to the University of Washington in Seattle, where he completed a Doctorate of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering in 2006.

At the University of Washington, Dr. Charles worked as a Research Assistant in the System-On-Chip Lab, and was involved in a variety of projects.  These included the design of a phase-locked loop for use in a direct-modulation wireless transmitter, and the design and fabrication of integrated CMOS phase shifters for phase modulation under phase-locked loop control in a Wideband-CDMA transmitter. His dissertation research involved analyzing and implementing phase and amplitude feedback systems for calibrating signal paths in phased-array transmitters. The contributions of this work were a means of compensating for variable losses in radio frequency phase shifters and a new method for setting the gain and phase of a signal path without requiring complex look-up tables.

Dr. Charles accepted an offer to return to the University of Utah as a faculty member in 2007, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  The chance to be part of the USTAR program was a key factor in his decision to return, as it provides the opportunity and resources to conduct leading edge research and the support to leverage the results of this research into real world technologies.  Since returning to Utah, he has established a laboratory for conducting research in the field of radio frequency integrated circuits focusing in the areas of low-power transceivers for sensor networks, UWB radios, phased array circuitry, and phase-locked loops. He has also developed a new graduate course on radio frequency
integrated circuit design, and plans to continue expanding the departments curriculum in the area of circuit design for communications.

Dr. Charles was the recipient of the Intel PhD Fellowship in 2005 from Intel Corporation, after receiving the Outstanding Student Designer Award from Analog Devices the prior year.  He is also recipient of the Young Innovator Fellowship and Wayne Brown Fellowship awards from the University of Washington Electrical Engineering Department and University of Utah College of Engineering respectively.

Dr. Charles is an avid rock climber, and when not in the lab he can often be found bouldering in Little Cottonwood Canyon or sport climbing in American Fork Canyon.  He also enjoys competitive cycling in the local criterium series, and takes advantage of the best snow on earth with nordic skiing at Soldier Hollow.

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Guido Gerig, Ph.D., U. of U. Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute
Gerig photo

Dr. Gerig joins the SCI Institute from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he is a Taylor Grandy Professor with joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Psychiatry. He received his Ph.D. in 1987 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich, Switzerland and has held his position with UNC-Chapel Hill since August 1998. At the University of Utah, Dr. Gerig will have faculty positions within the School of Computing, Department of Psychiatry and SCI Institute.

Guido Gerig began research in the area of medical image analysis in 1985 at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Since then, he has led a large number of national and international projects with close multidisciplinary collaboration between medicine, engineering, statistics, industry, and computer science. He has spent several research leaves as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Brigham and Women's Hospital at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Gerig is a member of the editorial board of the Journal Medical Image Analysis published by Elsevier. He is a board member of MICCAI, the international society organizing the annual conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, and has served on the committees of a number of computer vision and image analysis conferences and workshops. As the director of the UNC Neuroimage Analysis Laboratory, he supports a number of clinical neuroimaging projects with methodology for image processing, registration, atlas building, segmentation, shape analysis, and statistical analysis. Clinical driving problems are neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases and mental disorders such as schizophrenia, autism, fragile- X, chronic depression and Parkinson’s disease. Current key research topics are segmentation of MRI/DTI of the early developing brain in healthy and high-risk subjects, longitudinal analysis of multi-shape complexes to describe growth trajectories of brain structures, building of normative population atlases of volumetric images and embedded shapes, and new methodologies for statistical analysis of brain white matter using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Tools and methods developed through driving clinical applications are open source (ITK) and made available to public.

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Hamid Ghandehari, Ph.D., Biomedical Device InnovationHamid
Dr. Hamid Ghandehari, an expert in drug delivery innovation, will join the University of Utah in November, 2007, as a USTAR faculty member of the Colleges of Pharmacy and Engineering. He comes to Utah from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, where he is a professor and director of the Center for Nanomedicine and Cellular Delivery, member of Greenebaum Cancer Center, and faculty in the Maryland Bioengineering Program.

His research, funded by NIH, NSF, the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program and other agencies, focuses on the design and development of novel, soluble polymers for targeted delivery of bioactive agents to solid tumors. He has pioneered the use of recombinant polymers for gene delivery applications and synthesized water-soluble polymers that target tumor angiogenesis.

Dr. Ghandehari is the executive editor of Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews, associate editor of Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology, and Medicine, and on editorial boards of several drug delivery journals. He founded one of the first multidisciplinary nanomedicine centers in the U.S. with faculty membership spanning the disciplines of engineering, chemistry, dentistry, pharmacy, and cancer research, providing expertise for the design, development and transla­tion into clinic of nanosystems for therapy and diagnosis.

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Julie Korenberg, Ph.D., Circuits of the BrainKorenberg
Julie R. Korenberg, Ph.D., M.D will join The Brain Institute at the University of Utah and the Department of Pediatrics as a USTAR Professor in early 2008.

A leader in the molecular genetics of mental retardation, Dr. Korenberg has dedicated her career to better understanding the causes of Down Syndrome and Williams Syndrome, to facilitate develop­ment of better treatments and prevention methods. In addition, her team studies brain mechanisms that underlie the formation of strong human relationships (“affiliative behavior”) and is investigating the development of drugs that modulate brain circuits involved in these behaviors. Dr. Korenberg’s work currently is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the McDonnell Foundation.

Dr. Korenberg comes to Utah from the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is the Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Pediatrics and the Geri & Richard Brawerman Chair of Molecular Genetics. She earned her Ph.D. in Medical Genetics from the University of Wisconsin and her M.D. from the University of Miami School of Medicine.

In addition to the key senior scientists hired to date, many key researchers have relocated to Utah with the PI, and are actively participating in research activities within the USTAR focus areas. Additional junior faculty and staff positions are currently being recruited to complete these teams and will likely be filled within the next year.

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Dr. Brian J. McPherson, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
McPherson photo

Dr. McPherson joined the University of Utah as a USTAR Professor from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technol­ogy where he formed the Southwest Partnership on Carbon Sequestration ($19 million in DOE funding), one of seven regional partnerships funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to evaluate the science and technology of storage of atmospheric carbon in underground geological formations and in surface soil and vegetation.

Dr. McPherson will continue as Principal Investigator and Director of the Southwest Partnership here at the University of Utah, working collaboratively with New Mexico Tech. The partnership has just been selected by the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) to proceed to a deployment phase ($67M over 10 years), which will involve injection of approximately 1,000,000 tons of CO2 into a geological formation. The purpose of the deploy­ment phase is to assess the efficacy of geological CO2 storage and to evaluate this as an approach for reduction of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

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Marc Porter, Ph.D., Nano-technology Bio-sensorsMarc
Professor Marc Porter has joined the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of Utah as a USTAR Professor from Arizona State University where he was the founder and director for the Center for Combinatorial Science at the BioDesign Institute. He is an expert in the development of biosensors for early disease detection.

Dr. Porter is an analytical chemist who began his academic career at Iowa State University, where he was professor of Chemistry and Chemical and Biological Engineering, as well as director of the Institute for Combinatorial Discovery and the University’s Microanalytical Instrumentation Center. He is co-founder of Nanoparts, a company which manufactures gold nanoparticles, one of the most widely used classes of nanomaterials for chemical, bioanalytical, biomedical, optical and nanotechnological applications. The company has the ability to prepare gold nanoparticles of desired sizes, shapes, and monodispersity in a systematic way, and he is moving Nanoparts to Utah with him. Other companies co-founded by Porter include CombiSep, Inc., which mar­kets an analytical separation device; and Concurrent Analytical, which has developed a new-generation immunoassay system, the Ramanprobes™ System, for detecting and labeling antigens. This system received the prestigious R&D 100 Award in 2003; sponsored by R&D Magazine, the award honors the top 100 products of technological significance marketed or licensed during the previous calendar year.

Dr. Porter has over 200 publications and has given over 300 presentations at national and international meetings. He holds over 10 patents, with several more pending.

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Perry Renshaw, M.D., Diagnostic ImagingPerry
Dr. Renshaw is a leader in imaging to provide the earliest diagnosis of schizophrenia. He is involved in discovery brain imaging research in cognitive function and schizophrenia. Dr. Renshaw will join the University of Utah in Spring of 2008. He currently has more than $17M in research funding.

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John White, Ph.D., Biomedical DeviceJohn White
John A. White was born and raised in northern Louisiana.  Both of his parents are retired educators.  White’s older brother, Roger White, currently a medical device specialist living in Colorado, exerted a profound influence on John’s world view, introducing him to the rich fields of biology and engineering.  White received his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Louisiana Tech University and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.  After brief stints of postdoctoral work at the University of Texas Medical School, Houston, and the University of Iowa, White joined the faculty of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University, where he served for 13 years before joining the University of Utah. 

White’s research focuses on the mechanistic bases of spatially and temporally coherent electrical activity in the brain.  His approach blends technology development, electrophysiology, computational modeling, and imaging.  The goal is to develop new treatments for memory disorders and epilepsy, based on novel applications of electronic technology and methods of analysis from applied mathematics and engineering.

White has raised over $20 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and other sources.  He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Biological and Medical Engineering and a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society.

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Deborah Yurgelun-Todd, Ph.D., Diagnostic ImagingDeb
Dr. Yurgelun-Todd will join the University of Utah in the Spring of 2008. Her focus is on the identification of brain abnormalities that could represent risk factors for psychiactric illness. Specifically, she will be researching the effects of development on cortico-limbic networks in healthy children as well as changes produced by drugs using MRIs. Dr. Yurgelun-Todd currently has $3.8M in research funding.

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