Lai Symposium

The Department of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences hosted the first James Lai Virtual Symposium, in honor of our long time faculty member Dr. Jim Lai. Students, faculty, alumni, community members and friends helped celebrate the nearly 30 year career of Dr. Lai. This symposium highlights Dr. Lai’s research accomplishments, his outstanding mentorship of faculty and students, and his service to ISU and the College of Pharmacy. Research presentations were provided by Dr. Lai’s former students and collaborators.

has also just started moving her focus to the sensory systems in autism as a way to try to identify how autism progresses in those systems. It’s just the beginning, but it’s an exciting new direction.

There are also several people working on hearing loss, specifically age related and also some chemotherapy induced hearing losses. That type of hearing loss is something that’s a huge problem with some chemotherapies. So, we’re looking at ways to try to prevent those hearing losses or treat those hearing losses with new drugs

We continue to study the central nervous system effects from long COVID, therapeutics, and drug delivery for COVID drugs. We are also studying drug delivery of anti-inflammatory peptides, since they tend to fall apart as soon as they get in the body, and we’ve been able to extend the lifetime so that they can be used as therapeutic approaches.

Zebrafish are helping advance our research also. These are small little fish used in all kinds of genetic studies and other types of studies, that have a neural system that is very similar to what we see in the eel, yet it’s on the outside of their bodies. Dr. Danny Xu in Meridian incorporates the fish into his study of autotoxicity. Dr. Gustavo Gonzales-Cuevas also employs neurobehavioral investigative procedures to assess cognitive and emotional functioning in both larval and adult zebrafish. We’re soon going to outgrow our facilities so we are excited to see the expansion and renovations currently underway in both Pocatello and Meridian. As we grow our engagement with the community, it is our hope that more people will understand the exciting research that is taking place in our buildings as they drive by.