Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Education:
Pharm.D., University of California, San Francisco, 1994
Residency, University of California San Fransisco, 1995
I have 25 years of experience in basic, translational, data mining, and clinical sciences research in academic and private settings. Until 2005, my research emphasized cardiovascular and neuropsychiatric diseases as a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and University of California, Irvine (UCI) and a senior scientist at Abbott Laboratories. At Abbott Laboratories, I focused on metabolic complications of CNS drugs mainly through conducting large data mining studies on clinical trial databases. One of these data mining projects on metabolic complications of Depakote ER resulted in the discovery of cholesterol-lowering properties of divalproex sodium. When I was recruited back to UCI in 2005, I decided to broaden the focus of my research and shifted the emphasis of my work to aging and improving healthspan through a science that I introduced as Healthspan Pharmacology. After 16 years of developing and validating phenotypic studies in flies, I am now expanding my research portfolio and will include two additional projects: 1) To develop Drosophila as platform for drug discovery and repurposing using OMIC-AI technology and 2) To fractionate the botanical extracts that we have worked with and test the impact of the fractions on the healthspan of flies and in our OMIC-AI platform.
Honors and Awards:
2022: Faculty of the Fall Quarter, UCI School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, PharmD Class of 2025
2022: Readers View – Reader’s Choice Award, Silver Book Award (The Truth About Dietary Supplements)
2022: Silver Literary Titan Award (The Truth About Dietary Supplements)
2022: Royal Dragonfly Book Award (The Truth About Dietary Supplements)
2021: Speak Up Talk Radio Firebird Book Award (The Truth About Dietary Supplements)
2018: UCSF Campaign Dedicated Alumni Award
2014: UCI Anthology Yearbook Most Inspiring Health Sciences Professor Award
2013-2014: UCI Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences “Most Inspirational Professor Award”
2013-2014: UCI Distinguished Professor Award for Teaching
2013: Federal Executive Board Public Service Award for FDA/UCI Internship Program
2012-13: UCI Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences “Most Outstanding Professor Award”
2011: UCI Susan Samueli Center for Integrative Medicine “Discovery Award” 2011 UCI Dept. of Pharmaceutical Sciences “Overall Outstanding Professor
Award”
2008: UCI Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research
2008: “20 Women to Watch in Orange County”, OC Metro Business Magazine
2007-2008: UCI Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Teaching
Over the past 16 years, using Drosophila as my main model system, my research has focused on identifying and evaluating pharmaceuticals and natural compounds that extend lifespan and improve healthspan. We have developed and validated functional assays to evaluate the impact of these compounds on a number of focal and non-focal phenotypes. As the PI of an NIH grant in 2010, I evaluated the impact of 5 botanicals that extended lifespan on biomarkers of healthspan in flies: Rhodiola rosea, Angelica keiske, Rosa damascena, curcumin and cinnamon. This work resulted in 4 original research publications and an opinion paper titled “Healthspan Pharmacology”, which coined this term in an attempt to emphasize the importance of evaluating healthspan in addition to lifespan in aging research. Since then, other labs have replicated our work with a variety of other model organisms, including: C. elegans, silkworms, yeast, snails, and most notably leptin-deficient mice. These studies have served as a proof of concept for the fact that the phenotypic changes that we observed in a fly model were also observed in other organisms, including a mammalian model.