Scott Simon's Biography

Scott Simon, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of California-Davis

An Established Investigator of the American Heart Association, Professor Simon's work on chronic inflammation focuses on structure-function studies of integrin and selectin receptors and vascular dysfunction during atherosclerosis. His laboratory was the first to discover the signaling functions of L-selectin and E-selectin. More recently, his group has developed novel microfluidic vascular mimetic lab-on-a-chip systems that provide real time imaging of force and molecular dynamics in leukocyte-endothelial interactions under defined shear stress. A recently funded project on atherogenesis aims to develop artery-on-a-chip devices to gauge the inflammatory potential of native lipoproteins and molecular events underlying monocyte recruitment to endothelium conditioned with lipids collected from normal and metabolic syndrome subjects. These approaches provide low cost, real time tools to study the tissue level consequences and biomarkers to assess disease progression. Another funded project with the Krubitzer laboratory in the Center for Neuroscience applies microfluidic thermal regulators that were developed to reversibly cooling and deactivate specific areas of the neocortex. The goal of these studies is to examine changes in receptive field size and location for neurons during and after cooling posterior parietal and motor/premotor cortex.