MSU Department of Pediatrics & Human Development

The 12th Annual Pediatric Research Day: Innovative And Emerging Technologies In Pediatrics was Friday, March 22, 2013, at the Sparrow Hospital Auditorium, Lansing, Michigan.

Rangaramanujam Kannan, PhD, presented Nanotechnology-based Targeted Therapies for Perinatal Brain Injury and Beyond. He is a professor of Ophthalmology, Wilmer Eye Institute, Center of Nanomedicine, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

The winning oral presentation by Monalisa Patel, resident, Michigan State University, "Serotonin Regulates Intestinal Mucosal Morphology and Enterocyte Migration."

Five Posters of Distinction were also awarded:

• Katsuaki Kokima, Research Fellow, Wayne State University, "Clinical Significance and Developmental Changes of Auditory-Language-Related Gamma Activity"
• Emmalena Gregory-Bryson, PhD graduate student, Michigan State University, "Investigating Orphan Pediatric Disorders of Histiocytic Lineage Using Relevant Spontaneous Canine Models"
• Chinyere Oarhe, Neonatology Fellow, Michigan State University, "Hyperoxia Downregulates Angiotensin Converting Enzyme 2 (ACE 2)"
• Pankaj Prasun, Resident, Children’s Hospital of Michigan, "Functional Polymorphisms in VEGF, MMP2, and MMP9" Genes and Intraventricular Hemorrhage of Prematurity
• Shanice Akoto, undergraduate student, Michigan State University, "Serotonin Decreases RHOA Activation in CACO-2 Cells."

Presenter Bios

Gayle Gordillo, MD, FACS. received her undergraduate degree in psychology from Stanford University. She graduated from The Ohio State University College of Medicine and did general surgery and plastic surgery residency training there. She joined the faculty at Ohio State University in August, 1999. Since joining the faculty, she has served briefly as the Director of the OSU Burn Unit and founded 2 multidisciplinary translational research outlets: 1) the Hemangioma and Vascular Malformation Clinic at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and 2) the Comprehensive Wound Center at the OSU Wexner Medical Center. Both sites currently conduct NIH sponsored clinical and translational research. Dr. Gordillo has transitioned from a K08 awardee to an independent investigator and currently holds an active R01 studying mechanisms that regulate the growth of endothelial cell tumors. She also serves as an ad hoc reviewer for the Bioengineering Technology and Surgical Sciences study section for the National Institutes of Health.

Rangaramanujam Kannan, PhD, is a professor and co-director of the Center of Nanomedicine at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, from August 2011. Before that, Professor Kannan was a faculty in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at Wayne State University and Director of the Nanotechnology Lab at the NICHD Perinatology Research Branch, located at WSU. He obtained his PhD in Chemical Engineering from California Institute of Technology, receiving the Unilever award for the best PhD thesis in the country in the field of polymer science. After a year of postdoc at the University of Minnesota, and one year at 3M Corporate Research, he joined the faculty at WSU, where he won the NSF CAREER award. He has 7 patents and more than 75 refereed publications. He is also a co-founder and chief technology officer of Nanoscience Engineering Corporation, and is on the editorial board of the journal, Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine. At Johns Hopkins, he leads an effort towards translational nanomedicine based on dendrimer-based targeted drug delivery systems for perinatal brain injury and other neurodegenerative diseases. His group has discovered the unique abilities of dendrimers to target neuoinflammation and is utilizing these for targeted therapy. They achieve this through synthesis, in vitro and in vivo characterization of custom-designed dendrimer-based multifunctional nanodevices for the treatment of neuroinflammation, cancer and other diseases.