K
Iordanis Karagiannidis, PhD
Dr. Karagiannides received his Bachelor’s degree in Biology at Plymouth State University and his Master’s degree in Genetics at University of New Hampshire. He went on to study in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. During his graduate work, he researched the intrinsic changes in fat cell differentiation with aging and accomplished demonstrating changes in the expression of numerous factors involved in adipocyte differentiation with increasing age in the field of fat tissue physiology.
The main target of his research is to study the extent of abdominal fat tissue involvement in the generation of inflammation during inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). In this research, he found that fat cells respond to proinflammatory stimuli (such as the neuropeptide substance P), shown to be present during IBD, and in turn are able to produce inflammatory cytokines themselves. Such cytokines have also been shown to be involved in IBD pathophysiology. He hopes to ultimately achieve additional results through his research and demonstrate whether fat cells actively participate in the events taking place in the colonic lumen during IBD. As a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, Dr. Karagiannides received a three-year Fellowship Award from the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America to investigate the SP-mediated involvement of mesenteric fat tissue in the development of IBD. He joined UCLA in July of 2007 as an assistant researcher and a member of the Center of Inflammatory Bowel Disease at the Division of Digestive Diseases and was recently awarded a two-year Broad Medical Research Program grant to investigate the affects of obesity in colitis-associated changes in the intestine and mesenteric adipose tissue. Dr. Karagiannidis has been publishing his work in high quality journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Gastroenterology, and American Journal of Physiology. Dr. Karagiannides’ work is also consistently presented during the Digestive Disease Week meetings including Posters of Distinction.
Sahib Khalsa, MD, PhD
Dr. Khalsa received a B.S. in Psychology from SUNY Stony Brook in 2002. He graduated from the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Iowa, receiving M.D. and Ph.D. (neuroscience) degrees in 2009. He completed his residency training in Psychiatry at UCLA in 2013, serving as the program Chief Resident and Chief Resident in the UCLA Anxiety Disorders Clinic. At that time, he joined the department as a faculty member in the Division of Adult Psychiatry at UCLA, becoming an Assistant Professor in Residence in 2014.
Dr. Khalsa’s research examines how people feel their heartbeat, how the human brain maps cardiac sensation, and whether there is dysfunctional cross talk between the heart and brain in psychiatric and cardiovascular illnesses. To approach these questions, his studies have examined the effects of aging, focal brain injury, cardiac dysfunction, and long-term meditation practice on awareness of the heartbeat. Ongoing projects examine the neural basis of cardiac sensation, the neural basis of dysfunctional heart-brain communication in anorexia nervosa, and the impact of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICD) on awareness of the heartbeat. These studies aim to ultimately answer the question “How can we develop new treatments that re-establish a functional dialogue between the heart and brain?”
Dr. Khalsa’s clinical expertise focuses on the assessment and treatment of anxiety disorders. As a faculty member Dr. Khalsa served as Associate Director of the UCLA Anxiety Disorders Clinic, supervising resident physicians in the treatment of anxiety disorders. As founding Director of the Healthy Hearts Behavioral Medicine Program, an interdisciplinary endeavor started with the UCLA Cardiac Arrhythmia Center, he specializes in treating anxiety and mood disorders in individuals with cardiovascular disease and who have received ICDs. He also worked as an attending psychiatrist in the UCLA OCD Intensive Outpatient Program.
In February 2015, Dr. Khalsa joined the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as the Director of Clinical Studies, and as an Assistant Professor (tenure track) on the Faculty of Community Medicine at the University of Tulsa.
Ariela Khandadash
Lisa Kilpatrick, PhD
Lisa Kilpatrick’s research has focused on brain signatures related to brain-body dysregulation in stress-sensitive disorders, including irritable bowel syndrome. In addition, she has a long-standing interest in the influence of sex on these signatures, and she regularly attends and contributes to the annual meeting of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences. The exploration of sex differences in the mechanisms of treatment response is an important step towards optimizing cost-effective treatments for both men and women. In her role as a co-Investigator in the Bioinformatics Core, she will apply her advanced expertise on the analysis of resting state fMRI data, as well as other neuroimaging modalities, to implement the proposed neuroimaging analyses. She maintains this expertise through regular attendance at the Biennial Resting State Conference and Organization for Human Brain Mapping annual meeting, and she can quickly adapt to new developments in the rapidly-changing field of neuroimaging. In addition, she will lend her expertise in sex differences during the interpretation of the findings. She has collaborated with Drs. Gupta, Labus, and Mayer over the years and looks forward to contributing to this ambitious project.
Publications
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/lisa.kilpatrick.1/bibliography/43276745/public/
10833 Le Conte Avenue Center for Health Sciences 42-210 Los Angeles CA 90095 United States
Rob Knight, PhD
Barbara Knowlton, PhD
The focus of our lab is the study of the neural bases of memory. We use a number of different approaches, including neuroimaging and testing neuropsychological patients to describe functional differences between memory systems and the brain regions that support different memory processes.
Hon Wai Koon, PhD
Dr. Koon’s research is focused on the roles of antimicrobial peptide Cathelicidin in inflammatory bowel disease, intestinal infection and colon cancer. Cathelicidin is a natural endogenous anti-microbial peptide that is protective to host as a part of innate immune system. Dr. Koon’s laboratory was the first to show the anti-inflammatory effects of cathelicidin in C. difficile infection in mice and C. difficile toxin A and B in monocytes and macrophages. Cathelicidin mediates various anti-inflammatory signaling pathways that promote healing of intestinal mucosa. Such anti-inflammatory effects of cathelicidin may be protective to other acute and chronic intestinal inflammation. This involves the coordination of epithelial, endothelial and immune systems in intestine and establishes a new direction of research in digestive diseases across various functional systems in body.
Dr. Koon is also interested in the correlation of gene expression of cathelicidin and other antimicrobial compounds with the development of inflammatory bowel disease and other intestinal diseases.
Dr. Koon received Master and PhD degrees at the University of Hong Kong. He then completed his postdoctoral training in basic gastroenterology research at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of Harvard Medical School in Boston. He is Assistant Professor of UCLA Division of Digestive Diseases as well as a member of UCLA IBD Center and American Gastroenterological Association. Dr. Koon has a team of 3 undergraduate research project students, 1 postdoctoral fellow and 1 medical resident researcher. Dr. Koon’s projects are currently funded by NIH and CCFA grants.
Jason Kutch, PhD
Dr. Kutch’s laboratory is addressing the problem of chronic pelvic pain from a unique systems neuroscience perspective. He has a background in motor systems neuroscience, and have developed and published several non-invasive approaches to understanding muscle control in humans. They recently developed and published a new multimodal approach – including electromyography (EMG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) – for revealing neural mechanisms of involuntary control of pelvic floor muscles. As the co-director of the neuroimaging working group in the NIDDK-funded multi-site Multidisciplinary Approach to the Study of Chronic Pelvic Pain (MAPP) Research Network, he has played a leading role in the analysis of MAPP Phase I (2008-2013) fMRI data, and he currently plays a leading role in the design, implementation, and monitoring of the MAPP Phase II study (2014-2019). He leads MAPP research efforts to reveal brain imaging differences between pelvic pain patients and healthy controls, to predict longitudinal progression of pelvic pain symptoms from neuroimaging, and to stratify pelvic pain patients according to widespreadness of pain based on neuroimaging. In the proposed work, he will assist with the acquisition and analysis of novel 7T data to study sex related differences in patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/myncbi/1B12ukyP87vQk/bibliography/47270130/public/
540 Alcazar Street, CHP 155 Los Angeles C 90089-9006 United States