Richard J. Roman, Ph.D.,

Dr. Roman assists PhysioGenix scientists with client proposals designed to test the efficacy of drugs developed for treating hypertension, renal disease and diabetes. Dr. Roman also advises on client projects related to the Company's proprietary Type 2 Diabetes (T2DN) rat model. Dr. Roman is currently Chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and Director of the Mass Spectrometry Core. He is a leading expert in cardiovascular physiology, renal physiology and pharmacology. His expertise ranges from whole animal physiology and clinical assay development to molecular biology. Dr. Roman has mastered an array of technologies including micropuncture, tubular perfusion, intracellular imaging, laser Doppler flowmetry and mass spectroscopy. His academic studies typically incorporate animal models for studying kidney disease, diabetic nephropathy, and hypertension. He has published over 260 research articles. Dr. Roman holds a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Tennessee and earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Rutgers University.

Dr. Howard Jacob, Ph.D.

Dr. Jacob is Director of the Human and Molecular Genetics Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Professor of Physiology Genetics. He is known for applying genomics, and high through-put phenotyping, as well as comparative genomics and bioinformatics. His research centers on physiological genetics, genetic dissection and analysis of complex disease, especially target organ damage associated with diabetes mellitus and hypertension. He is the leading authority on quantitative molecular genetics of complex disease and Functional Genomics with over 100 published research articles. Dr. Jacob received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa and completed post doctoral work at Harvard Medical School, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Stanford University.

Dr. Carol Moreno-Quinn, Ph.D, M.D.

Dr. Moreno-Quinn is an Assistant Professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where she focuses on the genetics of renal and cardiovascular diseases. Dr. Moreno-Quinn is the Director of Animal Core, which is responsible for a colony of 8,000 genetically diverse animals for the development of new models of disease and Co-Director of Genomic Core, which manages the genotyping, sequencing and bioinformatic activities necessary to facilitate the adequate progress of different projects. Dr. Moreno-Quinn developed a rat model of Barth Syndrome by siRNA transgenesis; she has also developed and characterized a rat model of Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD) to study the identification of modifier genes and the interaction of PKD with renal disease and hypertension; and mapped the region on rat chromosome 1 involved in the lack of autoregulation of renal blood flow in the Fawn-Hooded rat. Studied the acute and chronic effects of GLP-1on renal function and blood pressure. Dr. Moreno-Quinn received her Ph.D. from Universidad de Murcia 
in Physiology and Pharmacology, where she focused on mechanistic research of the endocrine regulation of renal and cardiovascular functions. She also received her M.D. from the University of Murcia.

Andreas Beyer, Ph.D.

Dr. Beyer has extensive experience in the evaluation of blood pressure mouse models and vascular function in vivo and in vitro.  Dr. Beyer also has experience in the molecular and genetic evaluation of animal models and the Generation and management of transgenic animals.  Dr. Bayer received his Diploma in Biochemical Engineering from the University of Applied Science, Giessen-Friedberg, Germany and his Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Iowa. He also completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Rahmouni Laboratory, Internal Medicine, at the University of Iowa. Dr. Beyer received the Council of High Blood Pressure Merck New Investigator Award in 2006.      

Dr. Michael Gibbs, Ph.D.

Dr. Gibbs is the Chief Scientific Officer for Gibbs Biomedical Consulting, LLC, which he founded in 2009 after spending over 20 years in the pharmaceutical industry at Pfizer, Inc. in the Department of Cardiovascular, Endocrine and Metabolic Diseases. Dr. Gibbs serves as a consultant with PhysioGenix scientists in the design and execution of client proposals. In addition to whole animal physiology, his expertise includes extensive knowledge of the biochemical pathways of insulin signal transduction, glucose transport regulation, and the interactions amongst carbohydrate and lipid metabolic pathways. He is expert in using in vivo models to test hypotheses on novel drug targets, and then confirming the predicted therapeutic actions in various metabolic disease animal models of multiple experimental (pre-clinical through Phase III) and marketed drugs. In these studies, he placed extensive emphasis on incorporating an array of in vitro assays to validate early disease biomarkers that can be translated to the clinical setting. Dr. Gibbs has published over 100 professional articles and patents. He received his Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky. He completed his post doctoral work at Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, New Hampshire, and then was promoted to the research faculty in the Department of Biochemistry at the Medical School prior to his tenure at Pfizer.

Dr. Daniel Sem, Ph.D.

Dr. Sem received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from UW-Milwaukee in 1986 and his Ph.D. degree from UW-Madison in 1990 in the area of mechanistic enzymology. He did post-doctoral work under an American Cancer Society grant at McArdle laboratory for Cancer Research (Madison), followed by The Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, CA) doing NMR/structural biology of nuclear hormone receptors. He then worked several years in biotechnology before leaving to start a company that used NMR/structural biology to accelerate the design of drug leads, addressing significant opportunities presented by the genomics and proteomics projects. He joined the faculty at Marquette in the Fall of 2002. He is currently director of the Children's Environmental Health Care Center and Director and Founder of the Chemical Proteomics Facility at Marquette. Dr. Sem also co-founded and served as vice-president of Biophysics for Triad Therapeutics.

Dr. Behnam Ghasemzadeh, Ph.D.

Dr. Ghasemzadeh received his B.S. in Chemistry from Jackson State University and his Ph.D. in Neurochemistry from the University of Kansas and completed his Post-doctoral training, Department of Pharmacology, University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Ghasemzadeh is currently an Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Sciences, Marquette University. His research focuses on elucidating the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying synaptic transmission and synaptic plasticity with an emphasis on the cellular and molecular underpinnings of drug abuse in the brain and the cellular and molecular plasticity underlying schizophrenia. Using an animal model of cocaine abuse called behavioral sensitization, his team has identified a family of proteins in the brain which are regulated by repeated exposure to cocaine and in return can control the behavioral response to cocaine administration. The goal of this research is to identify new and promising pharmacological targets for therapeutic purposes. In schizophrenia, he uses an animal model of schizophrenia which represent both the positive and negative behavioral symptoms of the disease, and is investigating the pattern of gene expression of specific receptors and signaling proteins in the brain. The goal of these studies is to identify molecular changes in the brain that characterize these behavioral states.

Dr. Donald Carrigan, Ph.D.

Dr. Carrigan received his B.S. degree from the California Institute of Technology, his Ph.D. from the University of California - San Francisco and completed a post-doctoral fellowship with Department of Neurology at University of California - San Francisco. He has held faculty appointments at the University of California, University of Maryland and the Medical College of Wisconsin. While at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Dr. Carrigan held the positions of Assistant Professor of Pathology and Director of the Clinical Virology Laboratory in the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center. Through his work as the Director of the Clinical Virology Laboratory, Dr. Carrigan served on the transplantation committees of the Medical College of Wisconsin bone marrow transplant, heart, transplant, lung transplant and liver/kidney transplant programs. In addition, he served on the transplant committee of the pediatric heart transplant program at the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin and to provided frequent consults for the physicians involved in the MCW/Milwaukee County HIV/AIDS Program. Dr. Carrigan continues of focus on research involving immuno-compromised patients. Dr. Carrigan is also co-founder of the Wisconsin Viral Research Group, a biomedical research and certified viral diagnostic laboratory.

Dr. Konstance K. Knox, Ph.D.

Since 1997 Dr. Konstance Knox has served as the Director of Research for the Institute for Viral Pathogenesis, a nonprofit research laboratory specializing in the investigation of new and emerging infectious diseases and also for the Wisconsin Viral Research Group, a certified clinical diagnostic laboratory. Dr. Knox received her Bachelor's degree in Medical Laboratory Sciences from Marquette University in 1977 and became board certified by the American Society of Clinical Pathologists that same year. While working as a Research Technologist, Dr. Knox received a Master's degree in business management from Cardinal Stritch University in 1990. In 1992 Dr. Knox entered the graduate program of the Medical College of Wisconsin as a doctoral student in the laboratory of Donald R. Carrigan, Ph.D. She received her doctoral degree in Experimental Pathology in 1994. Her doctoral dissertation was named as the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation by the Medical College of Wisconsin in 1995. Dr. Knox's work on the role of human herpesvirus six (HHV-6) in chronic diseases also led her to be named the 1995 Distinguished Alumna of the Program in Medical Laboratory Sciences at Marquette University. Following a post-doctoral fellowship in the Immunotherapy/Gene Therapy Division of the Cancer Program at St. Luke's Medical Center in Milwaukee, Dr. Knox's research interests have focused upon the role of persistent viral and prion infections in chronic diseases of animals and humans. Dr. Knox has served as a special reviewer for the National Prion Research Program of the National Institutes of Health. She is a member of the American Society for Microbiology, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the Pan American Society for Clinical Virology. She has also served on the scientific advisory board of the International Association for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and also serves as a member of the scientific advisory board of the Wisconsin CFS Association.