Lab Members

Technical Support

The picture shows Pat receiving an award for 20-years service to the University. For the past decade she has kept the lab running (thanks, Pat!). She has undertaken pioneering studies on mouse cremaster muscle; she also does gorgeous tissue preparations, and keeps us all in order.

Here is Julie getting her 10 year award for all of that time she has been associated with the Sarelius lab. She is a whizz at developing new techniques. At the moment she is on leave, working on the newest Kuebel development. We're hoping to see her back soon.

Vivian works in the cell culture group in our lab, doing both general support work and independent experiments.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Coral Murrant
coral_murrant@urmc.rochester.edu

In the fall, Coral will be metamorphosing into an Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph. She has been studying mechanisms of local metabolic coupling in skeletal muscle, using intravital microscopy to observe arterioles in cremaster muscle of anesthetised hamsters. Most recently, she has been measuring calcium signals in blood vessel walls.

Keren Abberton
keren_abberton@urmc.rochester.edu

Keren is studying mechanisms by which endothelial cell cytoskeleton realigns on exposure to changes in flow (or wall shear stress). We’re trying to understand how endothelial cells sense flow and respond by being activated or by signaling to neighboring cells.

Graduate Students

Mike Kim
mkim@seas.rochester.edu

Third-year Biomedical Engineering student, and Tiger Woods wannabe. The overall aim of Mike's project is to understand what determines leukocyte-endothelial interactions in vivo. Using intravital microscopy, including real time confocal imaging, Mike has investigated local variability in venular wall shear stresses in relation to leukocyte behavior, and is currently quantitating adhesion molecule expression on venular walls.

Tasmia Duza
duza@seas.rochester.edu

Taz is a second-year Biomedical Engineering student. Her interest is in signal transmission along the blood vessel wall; she is studying mechanisms of dilatory signal transmission initiated by ATP, which can produce both dilations and constrictions, depending on whether it is applied luminally or to the outside of the vessel. This presumably relates to whether vascular smooth muscle or endothelial cells are the primary target of the ATP. Taz picked ATP to study based on preliminary experiments (during her lab rotation) that suggested that this would be a straightforward starting place. One of the first rules of graduate thesis projects is that simple initial projects are never simple - Taz is rediscovering that rule!

Joel Wojciechowski
joel.wojciechowski@mc.rochester.edu

Joel is also a second-year graduate student, but in the Biophysics program. He is studying leukocyte diapedesis i.e. migration of white blood cells through the venular wall out into the tissue where they do their job. Getting through the wall is a multistep process involving: leukocyte adhesion to endothelium; activation of the leukocyte to include cytoskeletal changes and pseudopod formation to allow migration across the endothelial surface to junctional regions; activation of endothelial cells so that they will "unzip" their junctional connections; passage of leukocytes through the endothelial cell layer, basement membrane, and smooth muscle of the venular wall; and directed leukocyte motile behavior in the tissue. Joel hopes to nail one piece of this puzzle.

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