OMRF adds two researchers in genetics, immunology
Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation has added two researchers to its scientific staff who will work in the areas of genetics and immunology.
Willard “Bill” Freeman, Ph.D., will serve as a member in the foundation's Genes and Human Disease Research Program.
Jacquelyn Gorman, Ph.D., has joined OMRF as an assistant member in the foundation's Arthritis and Clinical Immunology Research Program.
Freeman comes to OMRF from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, where he was an associate professor of physiology and on the research faculty at the Reynolds Oklahoma Center on Aging. At OMRF, Freeman will study how the brain's epigenome, the genome's organization system, changes with aging.
OMRF said his goal is to learn how to maintain a “youthful”
epigenome with aging in hopes of preventing age-related diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and dementia. Freeman received his degree in pharmacology from Wake Forest University.
Gorman previously served at the Seattle Children's Research Institute where she completed a postdoctoral fellowship. Her research focuses on how inflammation and viruses promote autoimmune diseases like lupus, multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes through anti-viral genetic variants.
Gorman earned her Ph.D. at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn.
In August, OMRF announced it had won a $36 million grant for another five years of research at the foundation's Oklahoma Autoimmunity Center of Excellence.