OMRF has added three researchers to its scientific faculty.
Ray Rezaie, Ph.D., has joined the foundation’s Cardiovascular Biology Research Program from St. Louis University School of Medicine, where he was a full professor for 17 years. He studies blood clotting and inflammation, including how clotting factors work together to stop bleeding and how they regulate inflammatory responses when blood vessels are injured. Rezaie received his M.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from Boston University.
OMRF also added two principal scientists to its Functional and Chemical Genomics Research Program. Magdalena Bieniasz, Ph.D., who did her postdoctoral fellowship at the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Utah, studies how ovarian cancer grows and spreads in the body. She also studies the genetic changes in cancer cells that can lead to chemotherapy resistance. Bieniasz earned her doctorate at the Medical University of Lodz, Poland.
Gaurav Varshney, Ph.D., comes to OMRF from the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., where he served as a visiting fellow since 2009. In the lab, he is developing a model for human deafness in zebrafish. Varshney earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology at Umeå University in Sweden.