James Kenyon, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Physiology and and Cell Biology in the School of Medicine, has been named director of the Nevada Idea Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (Nevada INBRE), a program grant sponsored by the National Institutes of Health to develop research personnel and infrastructure to enable Nevada researchers to compete successfully for grant funding.
Karen A. Schlauch, Ph.D., takes over as director of the Nevada INBRE-supported Bioinformatics Core and as associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University. The Bioinformatics Core, a research facility jointly funded by the University and Nevada INBRE, provides education and training that introduces researchers to new technologies in bioinformatics and biomolecular modeling. The facility also provides researchers with access to state-of-the-art computational resources to conduct integrative studies along the continuum of genomic, mRNA and protein expression, protein structure and metabolite profiling to provide a deeper understanding of function of biological systems.
As director and primary investigator of the Nevada INBRE, Kenyon will oversee the numerous research and training programs that INBRE supports throughout the state. Programs supported by the INBRE include the Nevada Biomedical Students Pipeline to mentor freshman and sophomore undergraduate students beginning studies in the biomedical sciences., the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, research support for INBRE Research Faculty and core facilities in bioinformatics, genomics, proteomics, biological imaging and cytometry. As a statewide project, the INBRE activities are supported by the Nevada School of Medicine, the University, UNLV, the Nevada Cancer Institute, Truckee Meadows Community College and the College of Southern Nevada.
Kenyon teaches medical neuroscience and directs research into the regulation of pain sensation. He joined the School of Medicine in 1987 and is a member of the the Cell and Molecular Biology and the Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology & Physiology graduate programs.
Schlauch has an extensive background in the development of computational tools and methods for the analysis of high-throughput transcriptional, proteomic, and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data. Her areas of research expertise include modeling gene interactions with combinatorial methods, visualization of biological expression data using novel clustering algorithms, graph-theoretic modeling of temporal gene expression data sets, and automated fine mapping and visualization of haplotypes within SNP data sets.