SEEMA KHURANA

Prof. Seema Khurana has over 30 years of leadership experience in running federally funded research laboratories, assembling, supervising, and successfully leading to fruition of these research programs. She has worked independently to plan, organize and conduct biomedical research studying intestinal injury repair mechanism and studying epithelial dysfunction during colorectal carcinogenesis by employing a variety of cell models, animal models of inflammation-injury-repair and colorectal carcinoma and by generating ex vivo models of human disease form patient-derived tissue. 

Prof. Khurana has successfully analyzed trends in biomedical research, identified areas of urgent need, determined scientific and experimental approaches to conduct research, identified the immediate and long-term impact of the research program on human health, and successfully obtained funding for these research proposals. She has conducted research, evaluated the outcome of research, proposed future research, sought new funding to support ongoing and future research, sought solutions in response to changes in funding levels and policies to successfully conduct close to three decades of research studying two major gastrointestinal disorders, inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal carcinomas. 

Prof. Khurana has collaborated with scientists and physician-scientists both within the United States and internationally performing research related to gastrointestinal diseases with the goal of improving human health. This involved multidisciplinary approaches related to mucosal biology and pathobiology and included biomedical engineers, chemical engineers, chemists, structural biologists, physiologists, cell biologists, veterinarians, pathologists, gastroenterologists, among others. She has published research articles in peer-reviewed high impact journals. 

During her almost three decades of research and teaching career, she has taught undergraduates, graduates, post-graduates, medical students, dental students and nursing students. She has mentored 48 trainees; all of them holding tenured, tenure-track academic positions or are leaders in the biomedical and pharmaceutical industry. She has a three-decade-long and ongoing commitment to NIH, NSF and the VA, serving on grant review panels and study sections. Additionally, she continues to perform similar services for other international agencies, such as the Medical Research Council of UK, the National Medical Research Council for the Government of Singapore, to name a few. Dr. Khurana is familiar with basic, clinical and translational research and has served in multiple leadership roles both at the national and international level.