Q&A with Fan Zhang

Published March 20, 2024, by Judith Van Dongen

Fan Zhang spent more than a decade exploring different research topics before landing in the lab of WSU professor of pharmaceutical sciences Jiyue Zhu as a postdoctoral research associate. Now a research assistant professor, Zhang studies the molecular mechanisms of cancer and aging, hoping to contribute to scientific advances in those two areas.

What exactly do you study and why?
My research is focused on the mechanisms that underlie telomere length and telomerase regulation. Telomeres are DNA sequences at the end of each chromosome that protect our cells. They are like an aging clock—their length is shortened every time a cell divides. So as people age the telomeres in their cells become progressively shorter. However, in certain types of cells—such as cancer cells—telomeres do not shorten as cells replicate. This is because a gene known as telomerase maintains their length, making them immortal. By studying human telomerase regulation and telomere length in humans and mice, we can potentially identify new ways to treat cancer and aging-related diseases.

What is your educational and work background?
I received a bachelor of science in biotechnology and a master of science in botany from Zheijang University in southeastern China. After that, I left the area to gain work experience. First, I did drug development work in the research department of Shanghai Fudan-Zhangjiang Bio-Pharmaceutical Company in Shanghai, China. Next, I worked as a research assistant at Hong Kong University of Science Technology, where I conducted research related to CFTR in lung cells. Lack of the CFTR gene causes cystic fibrosis, a disease that damages lungs and other organs due to a buildup of sticky, thick mucus. Then for a short time I went back to Zheijang University, where I helped my master’s degree mentor to manage a project that involved genetically modifying rice to create more stress-tolerant varieties. Finally, I completed my PhD at Zheijang University, where I studied neurogenesis in fruit flies. Neurogenesis is the process by which neurons are generated from neural stem cells. That piqued my interest in cancer research because when the mechanisms that control neurogenesis fail cells can become cancerous.

When did you join WSU and what attracted you here?
My PhD mentor had encouraged me to explore different fields to help me open my mind to new ideas and different ways of looking at research questions. After completing my PhD, I wanted something a bit different. Dr. Zhu was recruiting at the time, so I joined his lab in 2014. I started out as a postdoctoral research associate, was a research associate for a few years, and was finally promoted to research assistant professor last year.

What are you working on currently?
With funding support from the National Institute on Aging, Dr. Zhu and I have spent the last four years developing a mouse model with a telomere length that is very close to that of humans. Mouse models are used to study fundamental research questions related to human health. However, there are huge differences between human telomeres and mouse telomeres. Mouse telomeres are five times as long as those in humans, even though mice have a lifespan of only two years. For that reason, study results in mice don’t necessarily reflect how things work in humans, which limits the usefulness of mouse models in studying telomeres and telomerase. To address this problem, we have developed a mouse with humanized telomerase regulation that is very close to how telomerase works in the human body. We have written up a paper on it that has been published as a preprint. Our next step is to conduct longevity studies in which we will compare the lifespan of mice with humanized telomere length to that of wild-type mice. We hope to show that mice with humanized telomeres will show age-related diseases at an earlier age than wild-type mice.

In another project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense Defense Health Agency, we are using our new mouse model as the basis for developing a melanoma mouse model with humanlike short telomeres. This new model will help us better understand the mechanisms of melanoma development in humans, which can lead to better prevention and treatment of melanoma skin cancer.

I’m also a co-investigator on another grant awarded to Dr. Zhu by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences that looks at the molecular mechanisms of telomerase regulation during development.

Has anyone been especially helpful to you in your research career so far?
Dr. Zhu has been very helpful. He’s a good mentor. The same goes for Xiaohang Yang, the mentor who oversaw my PhD research project in China. Also, at different times there have been a lot of people who have helped me get familiarized as I pursued different fields in different cities.

What do you enjoy most about working at WSU?
I love my coworkers. They are very open and collaborative. We work well as a team. I’ve also enjoyed the strong support I have received from research service center staff on campus. They’re always ready to lend a hand if you need help.

What are you most proud of achieving so far?
I am especially proud of our mouse model. I was selected to give an oral presentation on it during the 2024 Allied Genetics Conference held earlier this month, which was a great opportunity to share our work with other scientists in the field.

What do you like to do when you are not in the lab?
Spokane has a lot of beautiful lakes and mountain scenery, so I enjoy hanging out with friends and taking photos. I also practice tai chi, a Chinese martial art that is a popular form of gentle exercise. My tai chi practice group meets every weekend. During the warmer months, you can find us outside in Manito Park.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q&A with Jessica Saniguq Ullrich

Published January 8, 2024, by Judith Van Dongen

Despite the distance between Spokane and her Tribe of Nome Eskimo Community, Jessica Saniguq Ullrich’s work has brought her closer to her community. Since January 2023, Ullrich has served as a research assistant professor in the WSU Institute for Research and Education to Advance Community Health (IREACH), where she is part of a large contingent of Native scholars who are conducting research aimed at reducing health disparities in U.S. Native populations.

What is your research focus?
I study Indigenous child wellbeing, which is my drive and passion and why I went back to school after working in child welfare in Alaska for 10 years. About 70 percent of children in foster care in Alaska are Alaska Native, even though Alaska Native people make up only 20 percent of the overall population in the state. That’s a huge disparity, and those outcomes have remained the same despite a lot of good efforts being made to change them. That fueled my desire to learn how to engage in research and see if it could help shine a light on what’s working, what’s not working and what to do about this problem.

What did your career path look like once you decided to venture into research?
I attended the University of Washington, where I got a PhD in social welfare and was a trainee in the university’s Indigenous Wellness Research Institute. As part of the work I did there, I crafted an Indigenous connectedness framework based on a literature review and interviews I conducted with Native leaders in the Alaska child welfare system. Connectedness refers to the interrelated wellbeing of a child, a family, a community and the earth. I added elements of intergenerational connectedness—connections with our ancestors and future generations and with culture and spirit—to that. During the process of developing this framework, which now guides all of my work, I learned so much about how to help children, families and communities heal from trauma by promoting connectedness.

How did you land at WSU and what drew you here?
After completing my PhD, I worked in Alaska for a few years before moving to Spokane with my partner, who is in law school here. That’s when I got recruited to IREACH. I really love being part of an institute that focuses solely on research. The co-directors I met with are all very knowledgeable and experienced. I felt like I was going to get the skills, mentorship and support I needed to pursue some grants that my community was asking for. It felt like the right move.

What projects are you currently working on?
I’m working on tribal school development; language revitalization; and intergenerational health and wellbeing, all in my home community of Nome, Alaska. I feel like this could lead to exponential outcomes where we’re focusing on children, parents, elders and the community as a whole—not just individuals.

I have several grants that fund my work in this area. With a grant from the Spencer Foundation, I’m putting together a research plan for the development of a tribal school. I’m doing this work in conjunction with five tribes in Alaska that were selected by the state to engage in an education compacting effort, a process that authorizes tribes to operate and oversee K-12 schools that combine Western and tribal educational models. The curriculum for the new school will provide Native language immersion and will incorporate some of the ecological knowledge and community history that are absent in the standard curriculum. We’re starting with this one school, but hope it will ultimately lead to an entire school system that is more accepting of and responsive to tribal communities.

I also have a pilot project grant through the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute at the University of Washington. It funds a project to develop, in partnership with tribal leaders, a connectedness curriculum that promotes intergenerational health and wellbeing across elders, parents, children and grandchildren. The grant is part of a training program that encourages Native scholars to pursue careers in substance abuse and addictions-related health disparities research.

I’m also a site consultant for a project aimed at improving youth welfare outcomes in Hawai’i and am part of a National Science Foundation-funded research effort to alleviate the burden of energy inefficiency and high energy cost in in remote Arctic communities in Alaska.

What do you enjoy most about working at WSU?
I feel really respected and heard as an Indigenous scholar. I have not had to fight for my research agenda—it’s seen as legitimate and important work. Here at IREACH, there’s a whole focus on research and we’re all on the same page about the importance of community, so I don’t have to justify and explain the need. This is my job. I also love the opportunity to work with my community, because I didn’t go after a PhD for selfish reasons. I did it to help open doors for them, so I could be one part of an interconnected web focused on promoting wellbeing and helping with the healing efforts back home.

What has been your proudest research achievement so far?
I feel like the best is yet to come, but one thing I’m very proud of and excited about is that I got to present to the staff at Sesame Street as part of a diversity, equity and inclusion speaker series. They asked me to talk about how to help families through grief, with a focus on indigenous communities. I also worked with them to create an education video on the topic, which is still in the works.

What is the big-picture goal for your research?
My hope and dream is that we can understand and acknowledge some of the trauma that goes on and that has happened in the past so we can shift, transform and change that in the present time to benefit generations we will never meet. If we can help our children to not have to struggle; not have to expend all this energy on healing from trauma; and not have to close their hearts to protect themselves, our communities will benefit and be healthy as well. So that’s my goal, and I’m not alone. I’m so inspired by so many people who are doing good work in this area.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q&A with Molly Parker

Published October 23, 2023, by Judith Van Dongen

Since starting her educational and professional journey more than two decades ago, PhD in Nursing student Molly Parker has worked on environmental health and preventative health projects in Central America, provided community health services to California migrant farm worker families, worked with HIV-positive youth at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and served as an operating room nurse at Spokane’s Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center. Now at WSU, she feels like she has come full circle as she pursues a career in nursing science that incorporates her love of nursing, community health, and environmental health.

What made you decide to pursue a PhD and conduct research?
Research is really about finding new knowledge and problem-solving, which has always been an interest of mine. After nine years in the operating room, I decided that I wanted to get back into work that focused on social and public health issues, and I started looking at different ways I could use my nursing skills to do that. When I described my interests and background to Tami Kelley [the College of Nursing’s graduate senior academic coordinator, Ed.], she suggested the PhD program. My interests in climate change and health then led me to become a research assistant for College of Nursing professor and associate dean for research Julie Postma, who is a leader in community-engaged research within those areas.

What was your educational background coming to WSU?
I have a bachelor’s degree in community studies from the University of California Santa Cruz. I moved from California to eastern Washington around the time that I decided to go into nursing, so I went to Spokane Community College to study for my RN license and earn an associate’s degree in nursing. The credentials and coursework from those two programs made me eligible to enter WSU’s Bacc-PhD program, which provides baccalaureate-prepared nurses with the opportunity to earn a PhD in about four years.

Tell us about the research you have been working on for your dissertation.
I’m looking at outdoor worker exposure to wildfire smoke in the workplace, particularly in the agricultural worker community. In 2021, Washington state adopted an emergency rule to protect workers from wildfire smoke, which has led to a proposed permanent rule that is currently being considered. The rule requires that employers monitor air quality, alert their workers when levels are hazardous, and offer protective measures. Under Dr. Postma’s guidance and with funding support from the WSU Health Equity Resource Center, IREACH, the Pacific Northwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center, and the Northwest Center for Occupational Health and Safety, I conducted two studies related to this new rule. As part of the first study, I interviewed agricultural workers about their experiences working in smoky conditions and their perceptions of the available protective measures. In the second study, I surveyed employers and supervisors on how they perceive smoke hazards and components of the rule. What I’m trying to find out is what gaps in education or behavior exist related to wildfire smoke exposure and risk reduction strategies.

What do you ultimately hope to achieve with your research?
The particles carried by wildfire smoke are known to be hazardous to respiratory; cardiovascular; ear, nose and throat; and mental health, as well as harmful to the eyes. Agricultural workers work at high levels of exertion outdoors during smoke season, causing them to be disproportionately exposed to hazardous air quality. Our ultimate goal with this research is to reduce wildfire smoke exposure in this population, which is also impacted by social determinants of health, barriers to accessing care, and an imbalance of power in the workplace. In the long run, this will hopefully prevent or diminish downstream health effects in farmworker communities.

Why is it important for nurses to be involved in this type of work?
There is a close connection between climate change, severe weather events, changes in the environment, and human health. Looking through an occupational and environmental health lens, nurses can help pinpoint to what extent these changes contribute to health trends we are seeing and work toward solutions. We also play a key role in advocating for health equity in marginalized populations who may be facing more adversity and may not receive the same level of health care as other people.

Is there anyone who has been especially helpful to you in your journey to become a nurse scientist?
Dr. Postma has been my guiding light throughout all of this. She has opened a lot of doors for me. With her support and encouragement, I successfully applied to the Jonas Nurse Scholars Initiative, a competitive scholarship program that supports doctoral nursing students pursuing work within certain impact areas. She also nominated me for the Chancellor’s Excellence Community Impact Award, which I received in 2022. But most importantly, she introduced me to this community-based research approach of connecting with community members and involving them in a solution-based research process. Going into research I had pictured it as involving mostly numbers, statistics, and data, so realizing that I’d be able to integrate the community health piece that I love into research was wonderful.

What have you enjoyed the most about being at WSU?
My experience connecting with the communities in Central Washington as part of my research has been amazing. I’m not from Washington and really did not know that part of the state, but having lived and worked in farmworker communities in California it seemed very familiar to me and felt like home. I’m also very happy to be a part of this large, super-supportive contingent of WSU nurse leaders who are working on issues related to environmental health and climate justice from different angles. In addition to Dr. Postma, those who have contributed to this area of nursing science include Elizabeth Schenk, Patricia Butterfield, Gail Oneal, Phyllis Eide, Claire Richards, Sheila Hurst, Tara Marko, Melissa Vera, and others. It’s very cool to be part of this group, and it feels like a real research strength for the WSU College of Nursing.

When will you graduate, and what will be next for you?
I hope to do my preliminary exams in December and defend my dissertation next spring. After I graduate, I would love to stay connected with WSU as faculty so I can hopefully continue this line of research, stay engaged with Dr. Postma, and keep developing my advanced nursing skills.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q&A with Christine Muheim

Published August 7, 2023, by Judith Van Dongen

For postdoctoral research associate Christine Muheim, becoming a scientist wasn’t so much a predetermined path as it was an instinctive journey to follow her interests as they developed. This ultimately led her to the lab of WSU neuroscientist and College of Medicine faculty member Marcos Frank, where she has been working on basic science studies on the ties between sleep, learning, and plasticity since 2017.

What type of research do you do?
I’m interested in knowing how sleep helps learning and plasticity in the brain. Plasticity is the brain’s ability to adapt to changes in the environment. I want to know how this works in adults and young children. We know that children’s brains are meant to be more plastic at certain ages. These very sensitive time windows are when specific learning processes need to happen, such as the development of vision, language, and motor skills. What I want to know is how sleep alters communications between neurons in the brain in a way that makes us learn better and adapt better to changes in our environment across development and adulthood.

Why is this an important topic to study?
Sleep is such an essential part of our everyday lives. Everyone needs it, and we spend a third of our lives sleeping. It’s important to understand why we are the way we are, which is the first step toward understanding what happens when things are not the way they are supposed to be, such as in people with sleep disorders or other conditions that cause poor sleep. We also know that children sleep very differently than we do. Our society still thinks that children should follow our sleep schedule and needs. Sleep scientists have meanwhile accumulated a lot of evidence showing that a child’s brain is very different than an adult brain, and that might be for a good reason. Our recent study in mice has shown that there is a clearly defined window of time during development when changes in sleep can change circuits in the networks involved in learning processes and affect them quite drastically, which you can’t do at other times.

What has your research found so far?
We are mainly working in the brain’s visual cortex, which is a system that we can easily access and work with. Scientists have largely looked at the visual cortex at the population level, meaning that they recorded and looked at an entire cortical area. We have very little understanding of how different cell types and individual neurons within a cell type contribute to sleep-dependent brain plasticity. One thing that our research found is that individual cells within the same cell population can do very different things. This suggests that massing them all together will probably not help us understand. Our ultimate goal is to figure out what poor sleep does to plasticity so we can perhaps do something to help us learn better even when we sleep less.

What led you to become a sleep scientist?
I completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology at the University of Zürich in Switzerland. As part of my master’s program, I did a year of rotations in different types of laboratories. One of those rotations was in the lab of Steve Brown, a scientist who studied the circadian clock, the brain’s built-in 24-hour rhythm that keeps us on a day/night cycle. He asked if I wanted to join the lab, and I completed a PhD in neuroscience under his mentorship. As a long-time circadian biologist, Steve wanted to get more into the sleep field at the time and came up with a project that I worked on. It involved looking into what shapes brain waves seen in an electroencephalogram (EEG), a commonly used tool in sleep research that measures the electrical activity of the brain. From there, I started to read about sleep and plasticity. What little work had been done in that area had been pioneered by Marcos Frank. When I finally met Marcos at a conference, he was looking for a postdoc, and it seemed like a perfect fit for me.

What are some projects you are currently working on?
I have collected a lot of data on different cell types in the brain that look at how plastic they are when given a specific learning task. I’m currently analyzing all that data and trying to understand how this all flows together. We just recently published a very interesting study in which we looked at how the absence of sleep at younger ages affects changes at the gene level. We’re also interested in looking at changes at the protein level. There is this assumption that when something changes at the gene level it changes the proteins produced by those genes in the same way, but that might not always be true. In collaboration with College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences researcher Bhagwat Prasad, who runs a proteomics lab, we have been doing experiments to look at protein-level changes in a plastic brain as compared to a brain that is not plastic or that has been sleep deprived.

How has working at WSU advanced your career as a researcher?
Coming to WSU has helped me broaden my horizon and build a network of connections. And being part of a smaller campus meant I wore different hats, which has allowed me to learn more skills than somewhere where roles may be more specialized. Having that broad skill set helps me to better understand how other scientists come to their conclusions and results.

Is there anyone who has been instrumental to your research journey so far?
I’ve had two mentors who are very much responsible for who I am today. One is my late graduate supervisor Steve Brown, who saw qualities in me that I couldn’t yet see and who sparked an interest in me that was just amazing. The other is my current supervisor Marcos Frank, who has allowed me the flexibility to really follow my interests.

What do you like to do when you are not in the lab?
I enjoy gardening quite a bit. I love to grow serrano peppers and chilies and use them to make hot sauce. I can’t actually eat hot sauce, but I enjoy the process. It’s very similar to work in the lab in that it allows me to test different techniques, but with a lot more freedom to play around and experiment.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q&A with Anil Singh

Published May 3, 2023, by Judith Van Dongen

A biochemist by training, assistant research professor Anil Singh has conducted inflammation research that spans a variety of diseases, from diabetes to multiple sclerosis and cancer. Since joining the WSU Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences as a research associate back in 2014, he has been mostly focused on studying inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis, a potentially debilitating disease affecting the joints.

Can you explain to us what your research in rheumatoid arthritis entails?
Rheumatoid arthritis is both an inflammatory and autoimmune disease in which your immune system targets your joint tissues, resulting in loss of joint function, pain, and bone loss. This happens in response to the production of inflammatory cytokines, signaling molecules produced by certain types of cells. If you can shut off those signaling processes, you could halt the course of the disease. I am trying to better understand how these signaling processes work and identify the molecules involved to find a potential therapeutic target that could improve the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. My findings in this area may also translate to other inflammatory diseases, such as gout, and other autoimmune diseases involving inflammation, such as lupus, multiple sclerosis, and inflammatory bowel disease.

Why is it important to conduct this research?
There is currently no cure for rheumatoid arthritis. Since rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease, you cannot just replace a worn-down knee or hip, because the body keeps targeting its own cells over and over. So rheumatoid arthritis patients are put on medications that suppress their immune system, which is kind of like being on chemotherapy for life. While those drugs halt the damaging immune response, they also reduce an individual’s ability to fight infections. Plus, they don’t work for everyone and will often stop working as the body learns to outsmart the drug. One alternative to immunosuppressants is monoclonal antibodies, but those need to be administered via IV infusion and are extremely expensive. Having more effective treatments for rheumatoid arthritis would not only help patients but would also provide economic benefits to society since the disease is so debilitating that patients eventually have to leave the workforce.

Why haven’t scientists been able to find a cure for rheumatoid arthritis?
The actual cause of rheumatoid arthritis is unknown. Complex genetic and environmental factors come into play. A major barrier to finding a cure is the need to better understand the basic mechanisms that underlie the disease. That’s why we are dissecting the various mechanisms of inflammation to find molecules that could be effective drug targets, not only to relieve the symptoms experienced by patients but also to potentially cure rheumatoid arthritis.

What is your educational background?
I earned a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Hyderabad, one of the largest and highest-ranking public universities in India, my home country. During my PhD, I researched a protein that was thought to be linked to insulin resistance, which is when the body’s cells don’t respond well to insulin, ultimately leading to type 2 diabetes. Surprisingly, my study found that this protein—named resistin—actually promotes inflammation. Since doing this research, resistin has become a biomarker for many diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis.

How did your journey continue after you earned your PhD?
After my PhD I spent a year working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Maryland Baltimore, where I did research on multiple sclerosis. Then I spent another three years as a postdoctoral researcher at a cancer research lab at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, where I received a fellowship to study protein-protein interactions in breast cancer. In 2014, I came to WSU to join the lab of Salah-Uddin Ahmed, where my research focused on the molecular mechanisms that underlie chronic inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, ostheoarthritis, and gout. I started out as a research associate before becoming a staff scientist in 2017 and an assistant research professor in 2019.

What are some of the projects you have been working on here at WSU?
I spent my first few years at WSU helping Ahmed with a research project on how to use green tea’s anti-inflammatory properties to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Next, we conducted a study that identified a potential new target for the treatment of gout, a type of arthritis that causes episodes of painful and stiff joints. In the past couple of years, I have had the freedom to start working on my own independent projects. This has brought me back to studying Ets2, a cancer-promoting protein that I first worked on as a postdoc at The Ohio State University. With funding from the Arthritis National Research Foundation, I’m looking at the role of Ets2 in rheumatoid arthritis. The thickening of joint tissues in rheumatoid arthritis looks a lot like cancer, so it makes sense that this cancer-promoting protein may be involved in rheumatoid arthritis as well. In a mouse model of arthritis, I showed that if you remove Ets2 from the mice it halts the progression of arthritis. I also found that Ets2 changes the immune landscape of joint cells. I found that interleukin-6, an inflammatory cytokine, engages Ets2 to transform rheumatoid arthritis synovial fibroblasts—diseased cells that line the joints—into a different type of cells that destroy bone tissue. I’m currently doing more work to understand how exactly Ets2 works, how it changes inflammatory processes, and whether it could be a feasible drug target for rheumatoid arthritis and potentially other diseases.

In addition to my own project, I’m also working with Ahmed on two projects to determine the potential value of microRNA replacement therapy in treating rheumatoid arthritis. This work follows earlier research that found that the expression of a family of microRNAs known as miR-17 is significantly reduced in rheumatoid arthritis.

What is your proudest achievement as a researcher so far?
When I worked at The Ohio State University, I was an outsider in this cancer lab with a background in inflammation research. At that time, no one wanted to believe there was a connection between inflammation and Ets2. I feel very proud that I have been able to establish that connection.

What do you do when you are not conducting research?
I’m an avid photographer. I like to travel and take photos that showcase human emotion and art. In the past 10 years, I’ve taken probably 100,000 photos. Many featured pictures can be found at  https://www.instagram.com/anilsinghxyz/

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q&A with Solmaz Amiri

Published March 15, 2023, by Judith Van Dongen

In her 12-plus years spent at WSU Spokane, Solmaz Amiri has conducted research on an unusually wide range of topics—from crime, substance use, and mental health to cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, and respiratory diseases. A research assistant professor in the Institute for Research and Education to Advance Community Health (IREACH), Amiri is the first to admit that she is not an expert in any of those disciplines. Her area of expertise is in geographic information systems (GIS) and geospatial statistics, which form the foundation for her research.

How would you describe the type of research you conduct?
I study how health outcomes or human behaviors are influenced by the physical and social characteristics of environments in which people live, which is also known as the social determinants of health. In my research, I use GIS to quantify the environment. Then I look at the relationship of all these different measures with health outcomes, such as disease incidence, mortality, and so on. As an example, I might relate obesity to neighborhood walkability; access to green space to mental health; proximity to health care services to treatment adherence; or socioeconomic characteristics of neighborhoods to crime patterns. The ultimate goal is to identify which social and physical determinants of health influence a particular health outcome or behavior, which can provide clues as to how we might intervene to reduce health inequities.

How can you conduct research on health-related topics without a background in health or medicine?
Since I understand the methods more than the outcomes, I collaborate with others who do have expertise in those health outcomes. For example, a lot of our work on substance use is in collaboration with Michael McDonell, a substance use researcher here in the WSU College of Medicine. When we do research on cancers, we often collaborate with University of Washington investigators who are oncologists. I’m also part of an investigator program within the University of Washington’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, which helps me know enough about Alzheimer’s disease to be able to study the social determinants of health related to Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

What brought you to WSU?
I’m an architect and urban designer by training. After obtaining my master’s degree in my home country of Iran, I spent several years designing administrative and commercial buildings for an architecture firm in Germany. Over time, I started to feel that there might be better ways to use my degree to contribute to society. So I looked into getting a doctoral degree with the goal of becoming a researcher. I had been exposed to research as a student, a practicing architect, and even at home—my mom is an oncologist who was always trying to get me engaged in her research. However, until then, I had never seriously considered research as a full-time career. My search led me to the doctor of design program, which was housed at WSU Spokane at the time and was focused on bringing together professionals from different design disciplines to do multidisciplinary work. Once here, I started working with Kerry Brooks, who was the director of the WSU GIS and Simulation Lab at the time. He had a lot of projects related to the effect of the built environment on human behavior and health outcomes. My own dissertation covered a research project funded by the National Institute of Justice to predict residential burglary patterns based on urban design factors, in collaboration with professor of criminal justice Bryan Vila.

How did your research journey continue after getting your doctoral degree?
After I graduated, Kerry left WSU and Bryan retired. Luckily, Kenn Daratha, who was a member of my dissertation committee, stepped up to mentor me. He got me a research associate appointment within the WSU College of Nursing, where I taught statistics and research methods courses. Then when Ofer Amram was hired in the WSU College of Medicine to establish a GIS laboratory, I started working with him as a postdoctoral research associate. We did a lot of research related to disparities in health care access and environmental exposures. A few months before the COVID-19 pandemic started, I met IREACH founding director Dedra Buchwald. After I expressed an interest in having her mentor me and working with IREACH, we started collaborating in 2021. Dedra’s mentorship has been a milestone in my career and has really helped me advance my research.

What are some of your current research projects?
Here at IREACH, we are working on a cancer-related project that looks at how social determinants of health might be associated with cancer outcomes. Last year, we published an assessment of access to cancer treatment facilities here in the U.S. As a follow-up, we are doing an analysis of all neighborhoods across Washington State relating healthcare access, neighborhood characteristics, and other factors to cancer incidence, cancer stage at diagnosis and length of survival.

In another project that will soon be published, I analyzed mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to relate death rates from Alzheimer’s disease to the availability of physicians and to neighborhood characteristics such as racial segregation, socioeconomic factors like poverty, and the degree of rurality or urbanicity.

With my former postdoc mentor Ofer Amram, I’m working on a project to estimate neighborhood-level pesticide exposure for the Washington Tracking Network, a Washington State Department of Health program focused on making public health data more accessible. We also have another project looking at changes in people’s activity patterns pre- and post-COVID and what sociodemographic or built environment factors might have influenced those changes.

Additionally, I’m continuing to do research on how exposure to air pollutants relates to the incidence of asthma in children, for which I received a Ramboll Foundation grant a few years ago.

What is your proudest achievement as a researcher so far?
I’d say that I’m most proud of the fact that I have been able to successfully collaborate across different disciplines and cultures. As a result of that, I have been a co-investigator on more than 20 grants and have around 45 publications to my name, even though I am only a junior faculty member.

If you could thank someone for helping you get to where you are today, who would it be?
If I have to name just one person, it would be Kenn Daratha. The amount of support he has given me over the years has been incredible. If I can acknowledge multiple people, I would add Kerry Brooks, Bryan Vila, Ofer Amram, and Dedra Buchwald, all of whom have been instrumental to my journey so far.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Past Q&As

Q&A with Jessica Saniguq Ullrich

January 2024

Despite the distance between Spokane and her Tribe of Nome Eskimo Community, Jessica Saniguq Ullrich’s work has brought her closer to her community. Since January 2023, Ullrich has served as a research assistant professor in the WSU Institute for Research and Education to Advance Community Health (IREACH), where she is part of a large contingent of Native scholars who are conducting research aimed at reducing health disparities in U.S. Native populations.
» Read more

Q&A with Molly Parker

October 2023

Since starting her educational and professional journey more than two decades ago, PhD in Nursing student Molly Parker has worked on environmental health and preventative health projects in Central America, provided community health services to California migrant farm worker families, worked with HIV-positive youth at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, and served as an operating room nurse at Spokane’s Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center. Now at WSU, she feels like she has come full circle as she pursues a career in nursing science that incorporates her love of nursing, community health, and environmental health.
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Q&A with Christine Muheim

August 2023

For postdoctoral research associate Christine Muheim, becoming a scientist wasn’t so much a predetermined path as it was an instinctive journey to follow her interests as they developed. This ultimately led her to the lab of WSU neuroscientist and College of Medicine faculty member Marcos Frank, where she has been working on basic science studies on the ties between sleep, learning, and plasticity since 2017.
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Q&A with Anil Singh

May 2023

A biochemist by training, assistant research professor Anil Singh has conducted inflammation research that spans a variety of diseases, from diabetes to multiple sclerosis and cancer. Since joining the WSU Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences as a research associate back in 2014, he has been mostly focused on studying inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis, a potentially debilitating disease affecting the joints.
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Q&A with Solmaz Amiri

March 2023

In her 12-plus years spent at WSU Spokane, Solmaz Amiri has conducted research on an unusually wide range of topics—from crime, substance use, and mental health to cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, and respiratory diseases. A research assistant professor in the Institute for Research and Education to Advance Community Health (IREACH), Amiri is the first to admit that she is not an expert in any of those disciplines. Her area of expertise is in geographic information systems (GIS) and geospatial statistics, which form the foundation for her research.
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Q&A with Luciana Mascarenhas Fonseca

January 2023

An estimated 6.5 million older Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease, an incurable brain disorder that causes dementia and ultimately robs people of their ability to carry out everyday tasks. When the disease is diagnosed early, medications and cognitive therapies can be used to delay its progression. However, diagnosing Alzheimer’s in its early stages is challenging as reliable biomarkers are not yet widely available. Neuropsychologist Luciana Mascarenhas Fonseca—an associate in research in the College of Medicine’s Department of Community and Behavioral Health—is conducting research that she hopes will help change that.
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Q&A with George Tabatadze

October 2022

Radiation is used to produce energy, power spacecraft and satellites, and diagnose and treat disease, among other uses. Exposure to radiation comes with safety risks, which are at the heart of the work done by research assistant professor George Tabatadze and his colleagues at the United States Transuranium and Uranium Registries (USTUR), a Tri-Cities-based research unit housed in the WSU College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
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Q&A with Claire Richards

August 2022

How does an ICU nurse with an interest in end-of-life care pivot to a career as a nurse scientist studying power outages, extreme heat, and wildfire smoke? For assistant professor of nursing Claire Richards, it took a passion to better understand the health impacts of climate change, along with plenty of perseverance.
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Q&A with Patrick Solverson

June 2022

In July 2020—while the nation was still in the throes of COVID restrictions—Patrick Solverson drove across the country from Vermont to start his new position as an assistant professor in the WSU College of Medicine’s Department of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology. Stored safely in his back seat was $3,000 worth of pure elderberry juice, an essential component of his research on the potential effects of elderberry juice consumption on obesity and metabolic disease.
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Q&A with Chathuri Kombala

April 2022

We’ve all done our share of remote work these past two years due to the pandemic, but for Chathuri Kombala—a postdoctoral research associate in the College of Medicine—it’s an essential part of the job. As the first joint postdoc in a newly established gut microbiome science partnership between WSU and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL), Kombala has been working at PNNL’s main campus in Richland since first joining in August 2020. There, she has access to all the tools and technologies she needs to advance her research into the link between the gut microbiome (i.e., microbes that live in the human gut) and the circadian (or 24-hour) rhythms that help keep the human body on a regular day/night schedule.
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Q&A with Ekaterina Burduli

February 2022

The road to being a scientist isn’t always a straight path. For Eka Burduli, an assistant professor in the College of Nursing who studies the impact of substance use on maternal health outcomes, there were a few twists and turns on her path to academia. It started with a tennis scholarship that brought her to WSU from Israel in 2004. After completing an undergraduate degree in psychology at WSU Pullman and finishing her college tennis career, Burduli spent six years working as an assistant coach for WSU women’s tennis while pursuing a PhD in psychology in her spare time. Her love of academia and interest in research eventually won out, and she quit her coaching job to focus on her PhD before moving to Spokane for a postdoc position.
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Q&A with Chris Szlenk

December 2021

Looking for a change after completing his undergraduate degree in chemistry, Chris Szlenk left his home state of Alabama in 2017 to pursue a PhD at Washington State University’s College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. A rotation in the lab of assistant professor Senthil Natesan got him interested in the field of computer-aided drug design. Szlenk’s research in that area recently got him honored as a highlighted trainee author in the October 2021 issue of the journal Molecular Pharmacology.
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Q&A with Oladunni Oluwoye

October 2021

Earlier this year, Oladunni Oluwoye was recognized as an NAACP Inland Northwest Black History Month Icon for her research on increasing racial health equity in addiction and mental health treatment. Oluwoye joined WSU in 2016 as a postdoctoral researcher in the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine and recently got promoted to assistant professor in the college’s newly created Department of Community and Behavioral Health. She has a Ph.D. in health promotion and education from the University of Cincinnati and also completed graduate and undergraduate degrees in psychology at Alabama A&M University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, respectively.
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Q&A with Cassandra Nikolaus

July 2021

A research assistant professor in the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, Cassandra Nikolaus conducts research focused on food security within the WSU Institute for Research and Education to Advance Community Health (IREACH). Her journey into academia took her from her local community college in Everett, Washington, to Central Washington University, where she studied nutrition and dietetics and became the first in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree. She then completed her graduate studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign before accepting a position as a postdoctoral research associate at WSU in 2019.
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Q&A with Luciana Mascarenhas Fonseca

Published January 25, 2023, by Judith Van Dongen

An estimated 6.5 million older Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease, an incurable brain disorder that causes dementia and ultimately robs people of their ability to carry out everyday tasks. When the disease is diagnosed early, medications and cognitive therapies can be used to delay its progression. However, diagnosing Alzheimer’s in its early stages is challenging as reliable biomarkers are not yet widely available. Neuropsychologist Luciana Mascarenhas Fonseca—an associate in research in the College of Medicine’s Department of Community and Behavioral Health—is conducting research that she hopes will help change that.

Can you explain what your research entails?
My research examines the connection between intraindividual cognitive variability and Alzheimer’s disease in different populations. Intraindividual cognitive variability refers to how a person’s cognitive functioning might vary across tests and cognitive domains at one time point or within a short period of time, such as a few days. Recent research has suggested that intraindividual cognitive variability may be a promising non-invasive biomarker that could predict the onset of dementia. Some studies have shown that even 10 years before you are diagnosed with dementia you already have increased fluctuations in cognition that can be identified through neuropsychological testing. If we can show that measuring intraindividual cognitive variability is a useful way of identifying individuals who will develop dementia in the future, that would be very helpful to scientists, clinicians, and patients.

How exactly would it help them?
Intraindividual cognitive variability could prove to be a low-cost way to screen for dementia in a variety of settings, including rural and remote areas. It could help get people into treatment sooner, helping to delay or ease symptoms and giving patients and their families time to plan ahead. In addition, it could be used to identify individuals who could enroll in clinical trials of potential Alzheimer’s treatments, many of which target early stages of the disease. Finally, we could measure cognitive variability as an outcome to evaluate whether a treatment is effective.

How did you first become interested in studying dementia?
Growing up in Brazil, I had a close relationship with the older members of my family and especially my grandmother, with whom I shared a room until I moved to São Paulo at age 17 to study psychology. She was very healthy with a strong memory and good cognition and ultimately lived to age 98. Having her as an example of healthy aging, I was really puzzled when I met older people who had dementia or functional difficulties. It got me interested in focusing my psychology studies on dementia and aging. I completed my bachelor’s thesis on dementia in low-income, institutionalized older adults in Brazil.

How did your educational journey unfold after that?
After getting my bachelor’s degree, I started working with older adults with dementia before earning a master’s degree on death and palliative care at the University of Padova in Italy. When I returned to Brazil I started working with individuals with Down syndrome at the country’s largest institution for intellectual disability. People with Down syndrome now live much longer than they used to, but they experience accelerated aging and have a higher incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. By age 40, most have a buildup of amyloid plaques in their brains that is the hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, even though they may not show dementia symptoms yet. Their pre-existing cognitive impairment made it even harder to identify early-stage Alzheimer’s in this population. To offer effective support to my patients, I felt that there was a need to better understand the unique process of dementia in individuals with Down syndrome. This led me to my research career. I started a PhD at the University of São Paulo in partnership with the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. As part of my PhD project, we validated the first instrument for diagnosing dementia in Down syndrome in Brazil.

What brought you here to Washington State University Spokane?
My husband, André Miguel, is a clinical behavioral psychologist who conducts research on the treatment of substance use disorders. He was hired in 2019 to work with WSU addictions researcher Sterling McPherson, and we moved our family here. I also looked for someone to do research with at WSU and found Naomi Chaytor, a neuropsychologist who was very welcoming and open to helping me achieve my career goals to conduct research on dementia.

What research projects have you been working on since joining WSU?
Naomi and I are collaborating on her NIH-funded project on type 1 diabetes and the relationship between blood glucose excursions—low and high blood glucose—and cognitive performance. I received funding from the Alzheimer’s Association to look for associations between cognition with Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers within this study. The study has adults with diabetes completing cognitive assessments through a smartphone app three times a day for 15 days while wearing continuous blood glucose monitors. They also provide blood samples for biomarker testing. Together, these measures enable us to examine the relationships between type 1 diabetes, cognitive variability, and Alzheimer’s disease risk.

Another recently completed pilot study looked at how intraindividual cognitive variability relates to brain structure shown in MRIs of Native American participants in a long-time NIH-sponsored cohort study. The pilot was supported by the Native Alzheimer’s Disease Resource Center for Minority Aging Research, a multicenter program led by Dedra Buchwald in WSU’s Institute for Research and Education to Advance Community Health (IREACH). My collaborators and I are hoping to receive NIH funding to continue this work by looking at these associations over a longer time period.

I am also pursuing grant funding to conduct research on cognitive variability in Down syndrome. This would allow me to get back to studying Alzheimer’s disease in this population and collaborating with my research teams at the University of São Paulo and the University of Cambridge.

What is the secret to your success so far?
My research builds naturally on my clinical experience, allowing me to identify dementia research questions with real clinical implications. I also owe a big debt of gratitude to the many mentors who have so generously shared their time and knowledge with me, but most of all to Naomi Chaytor here at WSU, Tony Holland at the University of Cambridge, and my late PhD mentor Cassio Bottino at the University of São Paulo.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.