Interdisciplinary collaboration is one of the hallmarks of breakthroughs at UT Southwestern, and for 20 years the New Faculty Research Forum has brought together early-career scientists in that spirit.

The 2025 forum, scheduled Oct. 14 at the T. Boone Pickens Medical Education & Conference Center, will introduce 14 UTSW researchers representing 10 departments and two schools to the campus community.

“The forum celebrates the arrival of our new colleagues who are poised to make lasting contributions in both fundamental research and human health,” said W. Lee Kraus, Ph.D., Assistant Dean for Research Development.

“Their work reflects one of UTSW’s core priorities: advancing science to unlock new strategies for preventing and treating human disease,” added Dr. Kraus, who is also Director of the Cecil H. and Ida Green Center for Reproductive Biology Sciences and Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Pharmacology.

“The New Faculty Research Forum is one of the highlights of the year for me, as it offers an opportunity to hear thought-provoking talks from wonderful investigators who’ve recently joined our campus community,” said Joan W. Conaway, Ph.D., Vice Provost and Dean of Basic Research.

Keynote speaker for the event is Jim Collins, Ph.D., Professor of Pharmacology, who is renowned for his groundbreaking work on schistosomiasis – a parasitic disease that affects over 200 million people worldwide. Beyond his scientific achievements, Dr. Collins is deeply committed to mentoring early-career faculty. He will share insights about starting a lab and succeeding at UT Southwestern.

The faculty presenters are all Assistant Professors who joined the institution since 2024. They will talk about their research interests, which range from finding new therapies or diagnostic tools involving cancer or heart, kidney, eye, infectious, and neurodegenerative diseases to exploring promising new scientific frontiers, such as expanded use of artificial intelligence to improve clinical outcomes and development of biomaterials for use in tissue repair.

For more detailed information about the event, check out the program and presenter videos. 

See a sampling of research from a few presenters:

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Quality Control of Protein Complexes Involved in Gene Expression

Kevin Mark, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Cell Biology, focuses his research on how the protein ubiquitin performs “quality control” of large multiunit protein complexes involved in gene expression. His team also studies how disruption of these control pathways leads to disease.

“Our cells have evolved sophisticated machinery to recognize and eliminate aberrant proteins,” Dr. Mark said. Many proteins form large multiunit complexes, such as the spliceosome, that carry instructions for building parts of the cell. His team studies what happens when these complexes fail to assemble correctly and how new therapeutic approaches can be developed by altering these pathways.

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Advanced Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine

Muhammad Rizwan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Ophthalmology, took an indirect career route to biomedical research by studying material engineering – particularly nanofabrication for devices. With support of a grant, Dr. Rizwan pursued bioengineering and now works to design hydrogels for medical and research uses.

“We try to create tissues that can be transplanted into the body, bringing us closer to a clinical impact,” he said.

He and his team study cellular responses to the chemical makeup and texture of hydrogels, with a particular emphasis on tissue regeneration in ocular, neural, and liver systems.

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Lysosome GPCR Mediated Nutrient Sensing and Signaling

Hijai Regina Shin, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern and of Pediatrics, investigates expanded roles of an organelle once thought to be simple.

“Lysosomes were, for a long time, considered the trash bins of the cell,” Dr. Shin said. “Now we know they can also function as a metabolic control tower that senses nutrients and affects metabolism.”

Lysosomal defects are factors in more than 50 childhood and adult neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases, she said.

Her lab focuses on G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) on lysosomal membranes and how they respond to lipids and amino acids within the cell to affect metabolism, with a long-term goal of linking defects in this system to human disease.

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Cell-Type Specific Transcription Regulation in Skeletal Disease and Bone Cancer

Jialiang “Shirley” Wang, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Charles and Jane Pak Center for Mineral Metabolism and Clinical Research and of Internal Medicine and Physiology, investigates cell type-specific transcriptional regulation in bone, with a particular focus on how these regulatory mechanisms are disrupted or co-opted in bone cancer and skeletal diseases.

“Osteosarcoma is the most common type of bone cancer among children. Despite advances, significant challenges persist in treatment using chemotherapy and surgical resection,” Dr. Wang said.

Researchers in her lab are exploring whether manipulating osteo-lineage transcription factors can restore normal osteogenic differentiation in osteosarcoma cells. Their goal is to uncover new, targetable pathways that could lead to more effective therapies.

Dr. Wang also investigates how osteocyte-mediated signaling regulates bone homeostasis and contributes to skeletal disease. Her team has generated a mouse model carrying a mutation that causes osteogenesis imperfecta. This work facilitated development of a novel approach to studying the mechanistic role of osteocytes in skeletal disease pathogenesis.

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Rewiring Neural Circuits to Restore Vision

Supraja Varadarajan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, Ophthalmology, and in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute, investigates the retinal ganglion cell (RGC), a type of nerve cell that is vital for relaying visual information to the brain.

She and her team study how signals from the brain stimulate damaged RGC axons to regenerate, to reach their target, and to form active connections. Her goal is to find ways to restore vision in patients with eye injuries or glaucoma.

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Additional presenters

Other new faculty members who will be presenting at the forum and their topics include:

• Glynnis Garry Bann, M.D., Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Molecular Biology: Rewiring Fate: Epigenetic Factors as Drivers of Cardiac Reprogramming
• Florence Chiang, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Radiology, in the Advanced Imaging Research Center, Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute, and a National Institutes of Health FIRST Scholar: Brain Network Characterization of Neurodegenerative Diseases Using Computational Neuroimaging
• Laurel Y. Lee, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine: Immune-Vascular Crosstalk and Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease
• Vivian Lee-Kim, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Biology: From Genomic Variants to Vascular Mechanisms
• Fangyu Liu, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Pharmacology: Structure-Docking Synergy for Ligand Discovery
• Yoshiharu Muto, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine: Cracking the Code of Kidney Disease: Insights from Epigenetic Alteration
• Wenqi Shi, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health: Large Language Models Powered Autonomous Agents for Complex Medical Reasoning
• Hani Suleiman, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Biomedical Engineering: Molecular Determinants of Podocyte Actin Cytoskeleton in Health and in Disease
• Richard Voit, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and in the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern and the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center: Misbehaving Stem Cells (And What We Can Do About Them)