Elba Serrano

Last updated
Elba E. Serrano
Elba Serrano.jpg
Born
Old San Juan, Puerto Rico
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Stanford University, (Ph.D) Biological Sciences (Neuroscience)
University of Rochester, (BA) (Physics)
Awards Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
US Fulbright Scholar
Scientific career
Fields neuroscience
biophysics
genetics
cell biology
STEM education
Institutions New Mexico State University
University of California, Los Angeles
Stanford University

Elba E. Serrano is a neuroscientist and biophysicist who holds a position as a Regent's Professor of Biology at New Mexico State University.

Contents

She is known for her contributions to research on the nervous system of gastropods, inner ear development in Xenopus, neurobiology of glia, sensory signal transduction in guard cells, and for leadership of programs that recruit, train and retain underrepresented minorities in STEM. Her research considers the central role of ion channels in the reception and transduction of stimuli and integrates methods from genetics, physiology, and anatomy. In 2020 she was named as one of 100 inspiring Hispanic/Latinx scientists in America [1]

Early life and education

Serrano was born in Old San Juan. [2] Her father was a sergeant in the United States Army and a military veteran, which meant that Serrano was raised in Central America, Asia and Europe. She attended almost ten different schools and eventually graduated from the Nurnberg American High School. [3] She earned a bachelor's degree in physics at the University of Rochester, where she became interested in biophysics. Her undergraduate research was completed under the guidance of Edwin Carstensen, Professor of Electrical Engineering [4] [5] Whilst a physics student Serrano was one of two women out of eighty students. [6] [3]

She moved to Stanford University for her doctoral degree, where she earned a PhD in Biology specializing in neuroscience and biophysics under the supervision of Peter A. Getting in 1983. [7] Her dissertation considered the movement of ions across the cell membrane of giant neurons. [8] [9] [10] After earning her PhD she trained as a postdoctoral researcher with Bruce Ransom and Robert Schimke at Stanford University studying the effects of antiepileptic drugs and antineoplastic drugs on primary neural [11] and glial cultures. [11] [12] She then joined the laboratory of Susumu Hagiwara at University of California, Los Angeles Medical School. Here she became interested in sensory cells in plants and in the inner ear, in particular, the mechanosensory hair cells. [10]

Career and research

Serrano joined New Mexico State University in 1992, where she established NMSU's first neuroscience research laboratory. Serrano was selected as a Regents Professor in 2009. Her research considers the ear, hearing and balance,as well as the role of neuroglia in brain function. She has studied the transduction of light by plant stomata [13] and the formation of sensory organs, and the ways sensory cells acquire their phenotypes. She has developed approaches to image neurons and inner ear sensory cells with the scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy and in vivo, primarily using multi-photon microscopy., [14] as well as using high throughput methods such as RNA-Seq and microarrays to study genes expressed in the inner ear and cell cultures of neuroglia. [15]

Awards and honors

Serrano is the recipient of numerous awards and honors. These include: election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2012); the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) Distinguished Mentor award (2015); [16] the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (2018). [17] [18] Serrano also has been recognized as an American Association for the Advancement of Science International Lecturer on Women in Science (2002) and was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship. [19] She is the recipient of a 2021 US Fulbright Scholar Award for research in Portugal at the University of Aveiro. [20]

Mentoring and advocacy

At New Mexico State University Serrano served as Principal Investigator of the institution's NIH Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE) [21] and as the co-originator of the NMSU NIH BP-ENDURE Building Research Achievement in Neuroscience (BRAiN) programs, which have supported hundreds of underrepresented minority students across the university to enter biomedical research careers. [22] From 1992 to 2019 over one hundred and twenty students have earned degrees while completing mentored research in the Serrano laboratory, half of whom are women and over 60% are from underrepresented groups. [23]

In 2018, the National Science Foundation announced that it would establish the National Resource Hub for STEM Education [24] at Hispanic-serving institution(HSI Resource Hub) at New Mexico State University. [25] under Serrano's leadership. The Hub's mission is to increase the capacity of Hispanic-serving institutions to provide research and education activities that recruit, train, and retain students for the STEM workforce. [26]

National service

Serrano has served on Francis Collins' Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) of NIH National Institutes of Health (2014–2018). [27] She has co-Chaired the ACD Working Group on Diversity with Hannah Valantine [28] and is part of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Multi-Council Working Group. [17] [29] Serrano has worked on behalf of many scientific societies that promote research and student training including the Professional Development Committee for the Society for Neuroscience [30] and the Steering Committee for the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students. [31]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neuroscience</span> Scientific study of the nervous system

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system, its functions, and its disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, psychology, physics, computer science, chemistry, medicine, statistics, and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons, glia and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "epic challenge" of the biological sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New Mexico State University</span> Public university in Las Cruces, New Mexico, US

New Mexico State University is a public, land-grant, research university in Las Cruces, New Mexico, United States. Founded in 1888, it is the state's oldest public institution of higher education, and was the original land-grant institution in New Mexico. NMSU is a university system, with its main campus in Las Cruces and satellite campuses in Alamogordo, Doña Ana County, and Grants. Through the NMSU Cooperative Extension Service, it has centers or programs in all 33 counties in the state.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ann Graybiel</span> American neuroscientist

Ann Martin Graybiel is an Institute Professor and a faculty member in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She is an expert on the basal ganglia and the neurophysiology of habit formation, implicit learning, and her work is relevant to Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, obsessive–compulsive disorder, substance abuse and other disorders that affect the basal ganglia.

The White House BRAIN Initiative is a collaborative, public-private research initiative announced by the Obama administration on April 2, 2013, with the goal of supporting the development and application of innovative technologies that can create a dynamic understanding of brain function.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lydia Villa-Komaroff</span> Mexican American cellular biologist

Lydia Villa-Komaroff is a molecular and cellular biologist who has been an academic laboratory scientist, a university administrator, and a business woman. She was the third Mexican-American woman in the United States to receive a doctorate degree in the sciences (1975) and is a co-founding member of The Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). Her most notable discovery was in 1978 during her post-doctoral research, when she was part of a team that discovered how bacterial cells could be used to generate insulin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kay Tye</span> American neuroscientist (born c. 1981)

Kay M. Tye is an American neuroscientist and professor and Wylie Vale Chair in the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. Her research has focused on using optogenetics to identify connections in the brain that are involved in innate emotion, motivation and social behaviors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeanne Loring</span> American biologist

Jeanne Frances Loring is an American stem cell biologist, developmental neurobiologist, and geneticist. She is the founding Director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine and emeritus professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. She has founded two biotechnology companies, Arcos BioScience (1999) and Aspen Neuroscience (2018)

The Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1973. It is the largest multicultural STEM diversity organization in the United States, with a mission to advance the success of Chicano, Hispanic, and Native American students in obtaining advanced degrees, careers, leadership positions, and equality in the STEM field. It serves a community of over 20,000 members and has 118 student and professional chapters on college campuses across the United States and its territories.

Minerva Cordero Braña is a Puerto Rican mathematician and a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is also the university's Senior Associate Dean for the College of Science, where she is responsible for the advancement of the research mission of the college. President Biden awarded her the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) on February 8, 2022.

Luz Martinez-Miranda is an American-Puerto Rican physicist. She is currently an associate professor in the College of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Maryland. Martinez-Miranda is an APS Fellow and was the first female president of the National Society of Hispanic Physicists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erika Camacho</span> Mexican-American mathematician

Erika Tatiana Camacho is a Mexican and American mathematical biologist and professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is a 2014 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) awardee. She was taught and mentored in high school by Jaime Escalante, who was the subject of the movie Stand and Deliver.

Sarah M. N. Woolley is a neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute. Her work centers on the neuroscience of communication, using songbirds to understand how the brain learns and understands vocal communication.

Kristin K. Baldwin is an American scientist who is a professor at the Department of Genetics and Development at Columbia University. Her research focuses on using reprogrammed and induced pluripotent stem cells to identify mechanisms and therapies related to human genetic risk for neurologic and cardiovascular disease. Her lab also studies how disease and aging affect the genome; they have used cloning to produce the first complete genome sequence of a single neuron and helped assess the effect of aging on induced pluripotent stem cells that may be used for cell therapies. They also design bespoke neuronal cells in a dish to understand brain function and disease. Baldwin's earlier work included being the first to clone a mouse from a neuron and being one of three groups to first produce an entire mouse from a skin cell by generating induced pluripotent stem cells. epigenetic changes of the genome and the brain.

HollisT. Cline is an American neuroscientist and the Director of the Dorris Neuroscience Center at the Scripps Research Institute in California. Her research focuses on the impact of sensory experience on brain development and plasticity.

Mala Murthy is an American neuroscientist who serves as the Director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and is the Karol and Marnie Marcin ’96 Professor of Neuroscience at Princeton University. Her work centers around how the brain extracts important information from the sensory world and utilises that information to modulate behavior in a social context. She is most known for her work in acoustic communication and song production in courting Drosophila fruit flies. Murthy and colleagues have also published an automated system for measuring animal pose in movies with one or more animal.

Ilana B. Witten is an American neuroscientist and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. Witten studies the mesolimbic pathway, with a focus on the striatal neural circuit mechanisms driving reward learning and decision making.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kanaka Rajan</span> Indian-American computational neuroscientist

Kanaka Rajan is a computational neuroscientist in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and founding faculty in the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University. Rajan trained in engineering, biophysics, and neuroscience, and has pioneered novel methods and models to understand how the brain processes sensory information. Her research seeks to understand how important cognitive functions — such as learning, remembering, and deciding — emerge from the cooperative activity of multi-scale neural processes, and how those processes are affected by various neuropsychiatric disease states. The resulting integrative theories about the brain bridge neurobiology and artificial intelligence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Farah Lubin</span> American neuroscientist

Farah D. Lubin is an American neuroscientist and Professor of Neurobiology and Cell, Developmental, and Integrative Biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham within the Heersink School of Medicine. Lubin is the Principal Investigator of the Lubin Lab which explores the epigenetic mechanisms underlying cognition and how these mechanisms are altered in disease states such as epilepsy and neurodegeneration. Lubin discovered the role of NF-κB in fear memory reconsolidation and also uncovered a novel role for epigenetic regulation of BDNF during long-term memory formation and in epilepsy leading to memory loss. Lubin is a champion for diversity at UAB as the Director of the Roadmap Scholar Program and as a faculty mentor for several institutional and national programs to increase retention of underrepresented minorities in STEM.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maria Elena Zavala</span> American plant biologist

Maria Elena Zavala is an American plant biologist. She was the first Mexican-American woman to earn a PhD in botany in the United States. She is currently a full professor of biology at the California State University-Northridge, studying plant development. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the first Latina fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists, the first Latina fellow of the American Society of Cell Biology, and an elected fellow of the Institute of Science. In 2000, she was awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring, which recognises individuals who have increased the participation of underrepresented minorities in their fields.

Hey-Kyoung Lee is a neuroscience professor at Johns Hopkins University. She studies cross-modal plasticity between visual and auditory systems.

References

  1. ↑ "100 inspiring Hispanic/Latinx scientists in America" . Retrieved 2020-09-15.
  2. ↑ "Elba Serrano Page of the NSHP". hispanicphysicists.org. Retrieved 2019-11-02.
  3. 1 2 "AAAS: EHR: Section Name". ehrweb.aaas.org. Retrieved 2019-11-02.
  4. ↑ "Edwin Carstensen: A Pioneer in the Bioeffects of Ultrasound" . Retrieved 2020-09-12.
  5. ↑ "Elba Serrano - CDP Center" . Retrieved 2019-11-02.
  6. ↑ Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science. "SACNAS Biography Project". SACNAS. Retrieved 2020-09-18.
  7. ↑ "Peter Getting". Legacy.com . Retrieved 2019-11-09.
  8. ↑ Elba Elisa Serrano (1982). Variability in molluscan neuron soma currents (Thesis). Stanford University Libraries Theses and Dissertations. Retrieved 2019-11-15.
  9. ↑ Serrano, EE; Getting, PA (1989). "Diversity of the transient outward potassium current in somata of identified molluscan neurons". The Journal of Neuroscience. 9 (11): 4021–4032. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.09-11-04021.1989 . ISSN   0270-6474. PMC   6569929 . PMID   2585065.
  10. 1 2 Pearson (2017-04-25). Campbell Biology, 11th Ed. Bukupedia. ISBN   9780134093413.
  11. 1 2 Serrano, Elba E.; Kunis, David M.; Ransom, Bruce R. (1988). "Effects of chronic phenobarbital exposure on cultured mouse spinal cord neurons". Annals of Neurology. 24 (3): 429–438. doi:10.1002/ana.410240312. ISSN   0364-5134. PMID   3228275. S2CID   11618729.
  12. ↑ "Elba Serrano | Experts Guide | NMSU News Center". newscenter.nmsu.edu. Retrieved 2019-11-02.
  13. ↑ Serrano, E. E.; Zeiger, E.; Hagiwara, S. (1988). "Red light stimulates an electrogenic proton pump in Vicia guard cell protoplasts". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 85 (2): 436–440. Bibcode:1988PNAS...85..436S. doi: 10.1073/pnas.85.2.436 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   279564 . PMID   2829187.
  14. ↑ Serrano, Elba E.; Knight, V. Bleu (2005-04-28). Cartwright, Alexander N; Osinski, Marek (eds.). "Multiphoton imaging of quantum dot bioconjugates in cultured cells following Nd:YLF laser excitation". Nanobiophotonics and Biomedical Applications II. 5705. International Society for Optics and Photonics: 225–234. Bibcode:2005SPIE.5705..225S. doi:10.1117/12.590877. S2CID   135719094.
  15. ↑ "Elba Serrano". Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID). Retrieved 2019-11-15.
  16. ↑ Elba Serrano: 2015 Distinguished Award presentation, 2 December 2015, retrieved 2019-11-02
  17. 1 2 "NMSU professor receives presidential award". NMSU News Center. Retrieved 2019-11-02.
  18. ↑ "OSTP and NSF to honor 140 individuals and organizations with highest US award for teachers and mentors". nsf.gov. Retrieved 2019-11-02.
  19. ↑ "Ford Fellows Directory" . Retrieved 2020-09-12.
  20. ↑ "NMSU biology professor earns Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award for international research" . Retrieved 2022-04-22.
  21. ↑ Mojica Rey, Camille (2008-09-12). "Team Science and the Diversity Advantage". Science | AAAS. Retrieved 2019-11-02.
  22. ↑ Kesler, Donyelle. "$2.4 million grant will prepare undergraduates for careers in neuroscience" (Press release). Las Cruces, NM: New Mexico State University. News Center. Retrieved 2020-09-18.
  23. ↑ "PAESMEM » Awardee Profile". paesmem.net. Retrieved 2019-11-02.
  24. ↑ "National Resource Hub for STEM Education". hsistemhub.org/. Retrieved 2019-01-05.
  25. ↑ "NSF Award Search: Award#1832338 - Resource Hub: The NSF National Resource Hub for STEM Education at Hispanic-Serving Institutions". nsf.gov. Retrieved 2019-11-02.
  26. ↑ "NMSU selected for Hispanic-serving STEM resource hub". Las Cruces Sun-News. Retrieved 2019-11-02.
  27. ↑ "NMSU Regents professor chosen to advise NIH director" . Retrieved 2020-09-15.
  28. ↑ Hannah Valantine and Elba Serrano. "ACD Diversity Working Group: Report on the Progress of Activities" (PDF). Office of the Director, National Institutes of Health. Retrieved 2019-11-19.
  29. ↑ "Neuroethics Working Group | Brain Initiative". braininitiative.nih.gov. Retrieved 2019-11-02.
  30. ↑ "SFN Professional Development Committee (PDC)" . Retrieved 2020-09-12.
  31. ↑ Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students. "Final Program (2011)" (PDF). Retrieved 2020-09-18.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.