People

Dr. Ken Nakamura is a neurologist who specializes in diagnosing and treating patients with Parkinson’s disease at the Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders Clinic. He also runs a research laboratory at the Gladstone Institutes, where he investigates how disruptions of mitochondria—the “power centers” of cells that convert nutrients into energy—contribute to the development and progression of Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Piao is a physician-scientist with a focus in both neonatology and developmental neuroscience. She received her PhD with Alan Bernstein from University of Toronto, before completing her Pediatric residency at NYU and Neonatology fellowship as well as a post-doctoral fellowship with Chris Walsh at Harvard Medical School. Working in neonatal intensive care unit and laboratory, Dr. Piao’s career follows the bedside-to-bench-to-bedside paradigm.

Our laboratory focuses on understanding the causes of heart disease and on using knowledge of cardiac developmental pathways to devise novel therapeutic approaches for human cardiac disorders. Specifically, we study the molecular events regulating early and late developmental decisions that instruct progenitor cells to adopt a cardiac cell fate and subsequently fashion a functioning heart. We focus on transcriptional and post-transcriptional steps, including those involving microRNAs.

Ray Swanson is a clinician-scientist with joint appointments in the UCSF Department of Neurology and the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center. His research explores bioenergetics and oxidative signaling in neurological disease. His studies in the area of stroke aim to identify ways to mitigate the dendritic and axonal ischemic injury, and in particular injury caused by neuronal NADPH oxidase and cofilin-actin rod formation. Work pertaining to Parkinson's disease aims to identify interactions between neuronal redox state and alpha-synuclein aggregation.

Our laboratory is interested in understanding how B cell behavior is regulated after encounter with either “self” or “foreign” antigens. We postulate that overlapping mechanisms are at play in both scenarios. The lab seeks to define the rules that govern B cell responses to specific features of foreign antigens, including antigen affinity, valency and co-stimulatory signals. We are also interested in how the clonal composition of both the pre- and post-immune B cell repertoires is regulated.