My goal is to provide novel solutions for early disease diagnosis to improve patient outcomes. I have a strong background in biochemistry, analytical chemistry and translational medicine and have published 29 peer-reviewed papers, filed three patents, wrote one book chapter, and received awards and recognition from several scientific societies, including the US Human Proteome Organization and The Association for Mass Spectrometry: Applications to the Clinical Laboratory. I am the Director of a newly established Proteomics Core at Tulane University and have access to and expertise with the instruments required to perform these biomarker discovery studies.
One notable achievement (BMC Med. 2017) has been the development of a method to diagnosis active tuberculosis cases earlier and with greater sensitivity than the current clinical gold-standard method. This method was verified in a cohort from the Houston Tuberculosis Initiative, a population-based retrospective case-control study. More recently, my research (Sci Adv. 2020) identified an extracellular vesicle protein, Tspan8, that can predict distant metastasis in lung cancer. This biomarker was evaluated for its ability to predict the future distant metastasis in samples obtained from a prospective randomized clinical trial.