Pharmacology and Toxicology Graduate Group

Research interests:

Type-1-Diabetes:

Developing and implementing LC-MS techniques to elucidate the role of vitamin D and eicosanoids, particularly omega-3 fatty acid derived eicosanoids, as potentially protective factors related to type-1-diabetes.

Lung Cancer:

NIH lung cancer data collected from 2005-2011 shows only 17.4% of lung cancer patients survive five years after diagnosis. To increase lung cancer patients five-year survival rate methods of recognizing the disease earlier are essential. Brian is using untargeted metabolomics approaches to identify and validate blood based pre-diagnostic metabolite biomarkers.

Untargeted LC-MS Data Processing:

Untargeted LC-MS techniques create vast amounts of sample data. Maximizing the amount of metabolite information extracted from these samples while minimizing the exogenous background noise is a difficult task. Brian is working with Fiehn Lab programmers to enhance current data processing programs and extract as much relevant metabolomic and lipidomic information as possible.

Education:

Cell and Molecular Biology, B. S. (2011) University of California, Davis

Research Experience:

Staff Research Associate, 2013-2014 West Coast Metabolomics Center, Metabolomics CORE Lab, UC Davis

Instructor, MS Data Processing, International Summer Sessions in Metabolomics, 2013-Present West Coast Metabolomics Center, UC Davis

Junior Specialist, 2011-2013 Fiehn Research Lab, UC Davis

Student Researcher, 2011 Research Experience for Undergraduate Students (REU) Grant funded by NSF