Participating Faculty & Staff
Program Faculty + Staff

Deborah Barany
Assistant Professor, Kinesiology and AU/UGA Medical Partnership
Research Interests: Neural mechanisms of goal-directed movement, functional neuroimaging, non-invasive brain stimulation, neurorehabilitation

Carrie Harden
NSURE Program Coordinator

Jarrod Call
Professor, Physiology and Pharmacology
Research Interests: mitochondrial bioenergetics, regenerative medicine, electrophysiology, cellular metabolism

Adriana Copley
NSURE Program Assistant

Nick Filipov
Professor, Physiology and Pharmacology
Research Interests: Neurotoxicology, neuroimmunology, communication of the nervous systems in health and disease, basal ganglia disorders

Lohitash Karumbaiah
Associate Professor of Regenerative Medicine, Regenerative Bioscience Center, Animal and Dairy Science
Research Interests: Defects in carbohydrate biosynthesis and alterations in carbohydrate composition, development of new carbohydrate-based biomaterials for spinal cord injuries, traumatic brain injuries, and neural interfacing applications

James Lauderdale
NSURE PI
Research Interests: Cells and disease, cells in development

Emily Noble
Assistant Professor, Foods and Nutrition
Research Interests: Feeding behavior, physical activity, energy expenditure, mechanisms by which diet and exercise affect the brain and cognitive function

Assaf Oshri
Associate Professor, Human Development and Family Science
Research Interests: Children and youth well-being and resilience, understanding youth development using multi-method (observation, surveys, neuroimaging, stress physiology) and multi-level research (e.g., individual cognition, personality, family, peer, and neighborhood environments), mechanisms that underlie the link between early life stress in childhood (e.g., child maltreatment, poverty, cultural stress) and adolescent behavioral risk (e.g. substance use and sexual risk behaviors) and resilience

Ramana Pidaparti
Professor, Royal Aeronautical Society Fellow
Research Interests: design engineering and innovation, computational mechanics, drug delivery devices, STEM education

Jesse Schank
Assistant Professor, Neuroscience; Physiology & Pharmacology
Research Interests: The role of stress and neuropeptides in drug-seeking behavior using behavioral pharmacology, neuroanatomy, and molecular neuroscience.

Jing Xu
Associate Professor, Cognition and Dexterity (CoDex) Lab
Research Interests: Understanding how humans learn complex motor skills, how skills are maintained across age, how to restore them after neuromuscular injuries; identifying behavioral, cognitive, and neural components essential for hand dexterous function; deriving learning and control principles that support the acquisition and production of dexterous movement; exploring factors that influence rehabilitation; long-term goal is designing effective therapies to help patients regain their motor skills