Steven Albert, PhD, MSPH
Steven M. Albert is a Professor of Public Health, Department of Behavioral & Community Health Sciences, has conducted research on the epidemiology of ALS, with a particular focus on end-of-life care, clinical decision-making, and mental health and cognition. He has conducted three studies at the Eleanor & Lou Gehrig MDA/ALS Center at Columbia University and has been an invited speaker at the International MND/ALS Symposium and the ALS Society national meeting. His research on ALS has appeared in Neurology and Journal of Neurology:
1. Depression and End-of-Life Care in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis sponsored by National
Institute of Mental Health
2. Role of Spirituality in Adaptation to Disability in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis sponsored by
Fetzer Institute of Mental Health
3. Decision-Making and Palliation in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis sponsored by Open Society
Institute, Project on Death in America
Michael L. Boninger, MD
Dr. Boninger is Professor and Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. He is Associate Dean for Medical Student Research and holds secondary appointments in the Departments of Rehabilitation Science & Technology and Bioengineering. Dr. Boninger is a physician researcher for the Department of Veterans Affairs and Executive Director, UPMC Center for Assistive Technology (CAT). Dr. Boninger maintains active laboratory and clinical research programs in the areas of spinal cord injury and wheelchair technology and is instrumental in mentoring residents and pre- and post doctoral students while promoting their development and education as rehabilitation research physicians and scientists. He has lectured internationally on biomechanics of repetitive strain injury and assistive technology and its use in conditions such as ALS. He holds three U.S. patents. Dr. Boninger was elected as a Fellow in the American Institute for Medical Biomedical Engineering (AIMBE) in 2003. In 2002, he was honored with the Pittsburgh Business Times Health Care Hero Award for Innovation and Research. Under Dr. Boninger's supervision, medical students, residents, and graduate students have won over 35 national research awards. Dr. Boninger has over 100 peer reviewed publications.
Roger Day, ScD
Anthony Delitto, PhD, PT, FAPTA
Dr. Delitto is currently Professor and Chairman of the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and Vice President for Education and Research, Centers for Rehab Services. Dr. Delitto has received the Golden Pen award from the APTA in 1992, the Steven J. Rose Award for Clinical Research in 1993, 1994, 1995, and 2003 from the APTA Section on Orthopedics, the Marian Williams Award for Research in Physical Therapy from the APT Research Section in 1997, was elected as a Catherine Worthingham Fellow of the APTA in 2000, was asked to deliver the John H. P. Maley lecture at the APTA Conference in 2001, and was the recipient of the Carlin-Michels Achievement Award presented by the Pennsylvania Physical Therapy Association in October, 2001. He is active in the Sections on Orthopedics and Educations, and Past-Presdient of the Section on Research for the APTA. He has authored or co-authored over sixty peer-reviewed research papers. Dr. Delitto is currently involved in the treatment and research of low back pain, and has had many articles published on this subject. He teaches this same content to the post-professional students in the Master's Degree program in physical therapy at the University of Pittsburgh. More recently, he has taken the lead in studying the neuroprotective effects of exercise in Parkinson's Disease.Miquel Estevez, MD, PhD
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative motor neuron disease that has been associated with familial gene mutations and environmental toxin exposures. The genes involved in the familial forms of ALS suggest that oxidative stress, endosomal trafficking, and vesicular trafficking play a role in disease initiation. However, the mechanisms through which environmental toxin exposures precipitate a sporadic form of ALS are unknown, mostly because the identity of the environmental toxins that can initiate this disease are unknown. The one environmentally prevalent contaminant that has been specifically shown to cause motor neuron degeneration in farm animals and that has been associated with ALS clusters in epidemiological studies is selenium, but little is known about how it causes neuronal injury. To address this problem we have developed an invertebrate model of selenium-induced neurotoxicity using the genetically tractable model organism caenorhabditis elegans. Using this model we have obtained preliminary data that show selenium-induced neurotoxicity 1) involves mitochondrial injury to motor neurons similar to that seen in mouse SOD1 mutant models, 2) is suppressible by antioxidants as in mouse and invitro models of ALS, 3) involves an insulin-like growth factor pathway as it does in mouse models of ALS, and 4) involves Cystatis C, a protein whose concentration and subcellular localization has been found to be altered in human and mouse models of ALS. By using our genetically tractable model we are beginning to define genes responsible for selenium induced toxic responses that may also be relevant to environmentally influenced sporadic cases of ALS. Vanathi Gopalakrishnan, PhD
Dr. Gopalakrishnan is interested in the development of intelligent computational aids for clinical proteomic data mining. Her research encompasses the application of symbolic machine learning techniques to the mining of structural and genomic databases in order to learn useful models and associations. She has established a productive collaboration over the last two years with Dr. Bowser involving cerebrospinal fluid profiling of ALS and has assisted with proteomic data mining of the mass spectra to identify disease-specific biomarkers. Her long-term interests include learning of useful models for predicting disease onset and progression from integration of clinical information with genomic and proteomic markers. Ronald Hamilton, MD
Dr. Hamilton serves as Director of Neuropathology Core of the Stephen Tuttle ALS Tissue Bank and is an Associate Professor of Pathology and Board certified in both Anatomic Pathology and Neuropathology. His main research interests involve the neuropathology of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's Disease (AD), Lewy Body Dementia, Parkinson's Disease, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). As Director of the Neuropathology Core of the AD Research Center, Dr. Hamilton supervises the banking of autopsy brain materials and has examined over 500 autopsy cases during the past 12 years. Recently he and Dr. Bowser reviewed the Pittsburgh experience with dementia in ALS and found that 30 percent of ALS patients with dementia have AD, which had not been previously reported. In addition to neurodegenerative diseases, Dr. Hamilton is also well-known for his research in collaboration with Dr. Ian Pollack on the molecular biology of pediatric brain tumors. Randy Hebert, MD, MPH
Dr. Randy Hebert is an internist with clinical and research expertise in palliative care. His research is centered on the effects of caring for a loved one on the health and well-being of family caregivers. Paul Sammak, PhD
Dr. Sammak is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences and a member of the Magee Women's Research Institute. His research focuses on the use of embryonic and adult stem cells for treatment of ALS. Dr. Sammak has found that laminin peptides on a polypyrole substrate are sufficient to induce human embryonic stem cell (HESC) neuronal differentiation, adhesion and proliferation without the need for feeder cells or differentiation media. Additionally, we find that co-culture of HESC with adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) selectively induces astrocyte, neuron or oligodendrocyte lineages and suppresses pluripotency. When injected into mouse brains, HESC-derived neural stem cells migrate and survive in the sub-ventricular zone, an endogenous stem cells niche, and migrate towards distant injection sites of glioblastoma cells. His hypothesis is that specific growth factors such as fibroblast growth factor and stromal-derived growth factor control stem cell migration and differentiation at sites of neural injury. Dr. Sammak is pursuing the use of ASCs and HESC-derivatives in collagen matrix beads for the treatment of ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases. Evelyn O. Talbott, DrPH
Dr. Talbott is a professor in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Epidemiology. Research interests include risk of CHD in women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, cardiovascular risk factors in women, environmental factors and cancer research support. Dr. Talbott's education and training includes a BS in Biology from Bethany College, MPH Epidemiology and DrPH Epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh.Jeffrey K. Yao, PhD, FACB
Dr. Yao is a Research Professor of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, and Research Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, School of Pharmacy, University of Pittsburgh VA Research Career Scientist, and Director of Neurochemistry and Psychopharmacology Laboratory, Highland Drive VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. A multiplicity of theories have been proposed over the years that aim to conceptualize the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative disorders, including impaired neurotransmission, viral infections, genetic mutation, energy metabolism deficiency, excitotoxicity, oxidative stress, and others. It is likely that complex disorders such as ALS, Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia are associated with multiple etiologies and pathogenetic mechanisms. In light of the interwoven biochemistry of human organs, identifying a network of multiple interacting biochemical pathways that account for the constellation of clinical and biological features would advance our understanding of these disorders. One such approach is to evaluate simultaneously multiple metabolites in order to uncover the dynamic relations in the relevant biochemical systems. Dr. Yao's lab has recently developed a high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) procedure using a Coulometric Multi-Electrode Array System (CMEAS) to simultaneously measure multiple redox-active low-molecular weight metabolites in a single column with a simplified binary gradient profile. These metabolites are a group of low molecular-weight, redox-active compounds, such as antioxidants, amino acids, catecholamine vitamins, lipids, and nucleotides, which reflect the metabolic processes including anabolism and catabolism as well as other related cellular processes, e.g., signal transaction, regulation, detoxification, etc. such an analytic approach has the potential to yield valuable insights into the likely complex pathophysiological mechanisms that affect multiple metabolic pathways, and thereby offer multiple windows of therapeutic opportunities.
Sasa Zivkovic, MD
Dr. Zivkovic is an Assistant Professor of Neurology in the Division of Neuromuscular Diseases. He is Board certified in Neurology with added qualifications in Clinical Neurophysiology and Electrodiagnostic Medicine. Dr. Zivkovic has authored 12 peer-reviewed articles and four invited reviews. His research interests include amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, peripheral neuropathy and cognitive difficulties associated with neuromuscular disorders (particularly frontotemporal dementia in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).
Candace O. Smigla, MS
Candace Smigla is the administrator of the Center for ALS Research. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Robert Morris University holding a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Communications and a Master of Science degree in Business Education and Communications. She coordinates the Center's tissue bank and gift programs, edits and publishes Center communications, and provides business administrative direction.