Michael Garrick, PhD, identified the first protein essential for normal intestinal iron absorption and the first mammalian iron transporter to be characterized at the molecular level. His work provides a major step forward in the understanding of iron metabolism.

Daniel Kosman, PhD, studies how organisms acquire and metabolize iron and copper, intrinsically toxic metals essential to cellular respiration and oxygen transport. One of his goals is to develop antifungal drugs to treat infections in humans.

Richard Gronostajski, PhD, recently received $3.5 million from the Empire State Stem Cell Board to establish a Western New York Stem Cell Culture and Analysis Center.

Norma Nowak, PhD, studies global comparative genomics and differential gene expression analyses. She contributed to the creation of the BAC libraries used to sequence the human genome.

Gabriela Popescu, PhD, is studying NMDA receptors in the brain, which are involved in synaptic development, plasticity, memory and learning, as well as in pathologies such as stroke, neurodegeneration, chronic pain, addiction, schizophrenia and epilepsy.

Te-Chung Lee, PhD, demonstrated for the first time, in an animal model, that injecting adult bone marrow stem cells into skeletal muscle can repair cardiac tissue, reversing heart failure. He and his team showed that this non-invasive procedure increased heart cells two-fold.

Mulchand Patel, PhD, is a specialist in nutritional biochemistry. He found that fetuses of obese mother rats were programmed in utero to develop obesity in adulthood, and was the first to show that this metabolic programming occurs in the fetal hypothalamus.

Kenneth Blumenthal, PhD, is an expert in protein structures. He researches structure-function relationships in ion channels using naturally occurring toxins as probes of ion transport and gating processes. One of his goals is to design drugs directed at the target channel.