Scott I Simon
Professor of Biomedical Engineering
University of California Davis
Seminar Information
This seminar will address the innate immune mechanisms governing acute infection and atherosclerosis. The onset of vascular inflammation is the interaction between circulating leukocytes and endothelial cells, where they attach to the wall of a blood vessel and migrate into effected tissue to ameliorate tissue insult. Our laboratory develops technologies to delve the force and molecular dynamics by which neutrophils and monocytes recruit to inflamed endothelium while imaging the multistep sequence by which leukocytes roll-arrest and transmigrate across inflamed endothelium. This presentation will focus on mechanotransduction events critical to integrin mediated outside-in signaling necessary for efficient recruitment associated with neutrophil’s host response to infection and monocyte’s role in arterial plaque formation.
Scott Simon received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego completing his degrees in 1988. Postdoctoral training in Immunology and Inflammation Biology was initiated at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, and completed at the University of New Mexico and the National Flow Cytometry Resource at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1993. He then joined the faculty at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine’s Section of Leukocyte Biology, Dept. of Pediatrics in Houston, TX, where he remained for 7 years and earned an Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association and a Whittaker Investigator award.
Scott has a lengthy record of progressive leadership and service to biomedical engineering research and education and the biomedical engineering profession. He was recruited as one of the founding faculty in a new Biomedical Engineering department at UC Davis in 1999, and rose to the rank of full Professor in 2002. He has served as Vice Chair of the department for 6 years and is currently Deputy Editor of the Annals of Biomedical Engineering. He was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in 2005 and a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) in 2010. His service to AIMBE includes the Membership and Awards Committee (2009-present). His service to BMES involves Board of Directors (2004-2007), Chair Affiliations Committee (2005-2010), Chair Awards Committee (2010-2013), and Session chair (numerous years). He served as VP of Science Policy for FASEB (2016-2017) and is current on Executive Committee.
Scott has a longstanding interest in the mechanisms governing leukocyte adhesion and signaling underlying inflammatory diseases. His work focuses on white blood cell recruitment in cardiovascular and infectious diseases. His group has investigated how selectins, integrins, and ICAM receptors mediate leukocyte capture in fluid shear and developed novel microfluidic vascular mimetic lab-on-a-chip diagnostics for assessing biomarkers that predict the onset of inflammatory diseases. His professional contributions also include service several stints on National Institutes of Health study sections including Bioengineering, Technology and Surgical Sciences and Musculo-skeletal Tissue Engineering.