UNT Health Biomedical and Translational Sciences

🌟 Faculty Spotlight: A career milestone for Dr. Raghu Krishnamoorthy. 🌟

Dr. Krishnamoorthy, professor of Pharmacology and Neuroscience, was named a 2026 Gold Fellow by the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. The honor recognizes ARVO members for their accomplishments, leadership and contributions to the Association. Dr. Krishnamoorthy was recognized at the ARVO Annual Meeting last month in Denver.

👉 Read more: https://bit.ly/4xvW7ae

Three weeks later and we’re still feeling the pride 🎓✨

🌟 Alumni Spotlight 🌟

A big accomplishment for Christine Nwanna marks another first for our BS in Biomedical Sciences program!

Christine, who was a member of the first graduating class of the program, was accepted to attend Howard University College of Dentistry and will start in August. She is the first graduate of the program, which launched in 2022, to be accepted to dental school.

Christine credits the program as a key factor in her acceptance. She says the support she received in the program helped to strengthened her study habits, learn how to manage a heavy course load and improve her resilience.

“This program gave me a realistic sense of what to expect in a graduate-level environment. I feel more confident in my ability to handle the demands of dental school and succeed in a fast-paced, challenging academic setting,” Christine said.

“I was fortunate to be part of the first graduating class, which made my experience unique. Being in an inaugural cohort allowed me to watch the program grow while contributing to its foundation. The faculty always wanted feedback and worked to create an environment that helped both academic and personal development. For all those reasons, I am forever grateful and proud to be a UNT Health alumni!”

Welcome UNT Health Pulse interns!

Over the next 10 weeks, these interns will join labs in UNT Health’s Department of Physiology & Anatomy, gaining hands-on, mentored research experience focused on cardiovascular health.

In addition to lab work, students will take part in seminars, career development, peer mentoring, and present their research at Summer Student Research Day. It's all designed to prepare them for future careers in healthcare and biomedical science.

The program is supported by the American Heart Association and led by Dr. Paula Gregory.

Last month, the Department of Pharmacology and Neuroscience hosted the 2026 Neurobiology of Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease Symposium to highlight research that explores how aging contributes to Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, cataracts, glaucoma and other neurological disorders.

The symposium also featured CBTS student research supported by The T32 Training Grant in the Neurobiology of Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health.

🎉 Congratulations to students who took home awards for their presentations:

🏆 Nathan Jones - James W. Simpkins Predoctoral Award in Neurobiology of Aging and Alzheimer's Disease

🏆 Ysabella Ruiz Pick - 2nd Place Oral Competition

🏆 Dr. Sal Essajee - 3rd Place Oral Competition

Highlighting our Clinical Research Management graduates!

These graduates completed internships, defended their work, and tackled some truly impressive projects along the way.

Get a closer look at what they accomplished: https://bit.ly/42ZeqXg

Graduation one day, orientation the next!

Big thanks to these Med Sci grads who walked the stage yesterday at commencement and are back today as orientation leaders to ensure a strong start for the new class.

So proud of our grads! 🎓 🎉 👏

🏆 CBTS recognized outstanding student achievement at its annual Awards Ceremony this month.

This signature event honors the remarkable accomplishments of students, faculty and staff, featuring special awards for outstanding students as well as honors presented by Student Association for Biomedical Sciences and the CBTS Values Committee.

🎉 Congratulations to all award recipients

📸 See more photos and the full list of awards: https://bit.ly/4v2istW

Congratulations Dr. Sal Essajee! 🎉

Sal completed his PhD in Integrative Physiology under the mentorship of Dr. Johnathan Tune, defending his dissertation entitled “The Gordian Knot of Myocardial Perfusion: Disentangling the Complex Interplay Between Coronary Flow, Metabolism and Contractile Function.”

Sal’s research focused on understanding how the heart matches coronary blood flow to metabolism and function, challenging the current paradigm of supply-demand balance, which asserts that any imbalances between blood flow and metabolism, leads to ischemia and adverse cardiovascular outcomes. His results provide evidence for a perfusion-contraction-metabolism matching paradigm, such that under conditions where coronary blood flow is impaired, the heart reduces its functional and metabolic capacity, arguing against the possibility for there to be a supply-demand “imbalance”. The research team also observed, that in conditions such as heart failure with underlying microvascular dysfunction, the heart still adheres to the perfusion-contraction-metabolism matching paradigm. The results from the studies highlight the need for future experiments that quantify these parameters together, in order to better understand the mechanism by which the heart begins to fail.

After graduation, Sal will begin a postdoctoral fellow position at UT Southwestern Medical Center, studying heart failure in human patients under the mentorship of Drs. Benjamin Levine and Satyam “Tom” Sarma.