Breakthrough Discovery Symposium I
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Kendra Carmon, Ph.D.
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Holger Eltzschig, MD, PhD Holger K. Eltzschig is an internationally renowned physician-scientist and healthcare leader. He is a Tenured Professor and the Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology, Critical Care, and Pain Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, McGovern Medical School. In addition, he holds the John P. and Katherine McGovern Distinguished University Chair at McGovern Medical School. He serves as Associate Vice President for Translational Medicine and the Vice President for Strategy and Development for Hospital-Based Programs at UTHealth Houston. He is the founder and Director of the Institute of Perioperative Medicine. As a practicing anesthesiologist, Holger received his clinical training at Harvard Medical School in anesthesiology, cardiac anesthesia, and critical care medicine. As a physician-scientist, he has consistently received NIH or DoD funding, with 4-7 concurrent R01 grants or their equivalents over the past decades. Eltzschig discovered functional roles of hypoxia-inducible transcription factors (HIFs) in preventing perioperative organ injury. Based on Eltzschig’s research, perioperative organ injury can be considered the third leading cause of death in the USA. Studies from his laboratory revealed that HIFs are stabilized during acute injury of the lungs, kidneys, liver, intestine, or heart and can be targeted for treatment. With an H-index of 108, he has published more than 340 peer-reviewed research contributions, including first- or senior-author papers in Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology, and many others. He is the lead author on four review papers in the New England Journal of Medicine, as well as many review papers in Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Reviews Cardiology, and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and of the Association of American Physicians.
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Valeria Vasquez, PhD Valeria Vásquez is a biophysicist and physiologist building a molecular framework for how bioactive lipids modulate sensory ion channels. During her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia, she mapped the conformational changes of an E. coli mechanosensitive channel under membrane tension. As a postdoc at Stanford University, she showed that phospholipids containing polyunsaturated fatty acids are essential for normal touch in C. elegans touch receptor neurons. Her laboratory focuses on the mechanosensitive channels PIEZO1, PIEZO2, and PEZO-1, which underlie cell volume regulation, touch, mechanical pain, proprioception, balance, food sensation, and ovulation. She launched her group in 2016, first at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis and now at UTHealth Houston, integrating mechanistic biophysics with translational applications. Her in vitro study, “Dietary fatty acids fine-tune Piezo1 mechanical response”, showed that fatty acid supplementation can mitigate phenotypes associated with gain-of-function PIEZO1 mutations that cause dehydrated hereditary stomatocytosis. More recently, her group defined PIEZO1’s contribution to sickle cell disease and used dietary interventions to modulate PIEZO1 function and ameliorate some of its symptoms. She has been recognized with the Eicosanoid Research Foundation Young Investigator Award (2015), the Biophysical Society’s Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award (2020), and UC Davis’s Pete Cala Physiology Award (2023). |
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Xinzhu Yu, PhD Xinzhu Yu is an Associate Professor in the Center for Neuroimmunology and Glial Biology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Xinzhu received her B.S and M.S. degrees in Biology from Tsinghua University in Beijing China. In 2007, she moved to the U.S. and earned her Ph.D. in Neuroscience under the mentorship of Dr. Yi Zuo from University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), where she investigated mechanisms mediating synaptic plasticity in the living brain. She then performed postdoctoral research at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) under the mentorship of Dr. Baljit Khakh to study astrocyte physiology and pathophysiology with innovative tools. In November 2020, Xinzhu started her lab at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to explore the intricate relationships between astrocytes and neurons and to understand how these interactions modulate neural circuit functions, influence behavior, and impact psychiatric and neurological conditions. To tackle these questions, her lab uses a multidisciplinary approach with genetic/chemogenetic tools, electrophysiology, in vivo imaging, behavioral assays, multi-omic approaches and computational modeling. In May 2025, her lab relocated to the new Center for Neuroimmunology and Glial Biology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston McGovern Medical School. Xinzhu is a recipient of several awards including NARSAD Young Investigator Award, Whitehall Foundation Research Grant, Brain Research Foundation Grant, and NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.
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