Dr Joanna Floros completed her PhD at Temple University School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA and her postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA. She held academic appointments at Harvard Medical School before she moved to Penn State University College of Medicine as a full tenured professor and in 2004 became the Evan Pugh University Professor in Cellular and Molecular Physiology. Her research interests are focused on the human surfactant proteins (SP) that play important roles in pulmonary surfactant function and structure as well as innate immunity of the lung.
Dr. George Noutsios was born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece, has a PhD in Biochemistry/Molecular Biology from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He joined University of Arizona in 2016 where he was involved in a collaborate effort to unveil the primary mechanisms of chronic sinusitis in upper airway diseases. In 2018, he joined Arizona State University as Research Assistant Professor where he conducts his own independent research focusing on deciphering the role of surfactant protein A in the development of bacterial sinusitis utilizing ex vivo and in vivo air-liquid interface models of airway epithelia.
Dr. Nithyananda Thorenoor, a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Joanna Floros lab at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, and been involved in studies on alveolar miRNome and the impact the innate host defense molecules (i.e. surfactant protein A (SP-A)) have on alveolar epithelial cells and alveolar macrophages (AM). Dr. Thorenoor obtained his Ph.D. in Biomolecular Science from Korea Institute of Technology, Seoul, South Korea. He did his postdoc training at CEITEC, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, where he worked on the role of long non-coding RNA ZFAS1 in colorectal cancer cell proliferation and apoptosis before joining Dr. Floros group.
