COM-T Faculty Spotlight

Meet Jing-Ping Lin, PhD!
Assistant Professor, Tenure Track
Department of Physiology and Department Neurology

Specialty Areas:

Recognition:

Why you should know Dr. Lin:

Transformative Platform
- Next-generation marmoset disease
- Multi-scale integration: MRI pathology, spatial omics
Translational Impact
- Identify early MRI biomarker before lesion onset (Science, 2025)
- Recognized as landmark study (Neurology Today, 2025)
Strategic Value UofA
- Developing distinctive infrastructure: marmoset colony, biobank, multi-modal datasets.
- Enabling cross-scale, molecular-to-physiology discoveries.

Meet Fakrul Islam Tushar, PhD!
Assistant Professor, Department of Radiology & Imaging Sciences

iTrialSpace
Synthetic framework for controlled assessment of lung CT

13,140 human lung nodules
54 attribute nodule profiling
Generates synthetic cohorts for controlled trial design
55,469-sample virtual lesion study spanning three medical VLMs, four spatial-guidance conditions and three clinical task produces synthetic cohorts that remain within the range of real clinical inter-dataset variability while supporting controlled evaluation beyond fixed retrospective benchmarks.

Meet Jennifer Stern, PhD!
Associate Professor with Tenure
Department of Medicine, Division of Endocrinology

Internationally recognized investgator studying glucoregulatory hormone signaling in aging and metabolic disease
Recent major discovery demonstrating glucagon signaling regulates aging and mediates calorie restriction - induced health span extension.
Dr. Stern's seminal work established that glucagon signaling was critical to normal aging and mediates the health span benefits of caloric restriction, identifying a new target to prevent age-related disease and slow aging.
The Stern Laboratory established that a moderate lifelong 15% restriction improves metabolic and physical function in aging rodents, providing promising evidence that the level of restriction achieved in human clinical trials could improve aging.
- Her lab is focused on translating her group's findings in mice to that of human participants in the nationally renowned CALERIE clinical trial.
For decades, it was assumed that glucagon stimulated fasting-induced lipolysis in white adipose tissue. Through a series of ex vivo and in vivo studies, Dr. Stern and her group established that knocking out glucagon receptors in white adipose tissue had no effect on lipolysis or lipid homeostasis, thereby eliminating this misconception.

Accomplishments and Research:

$4M+ in NIHZ funding secured since joining faculty in September 2018.
Principal investigator on 4 NIH grants (NIA R01, R21, R56, R00).
- Two additional NIH R)! proposals currently under review
- Additional grant support from ABRC and multiple University of Arizona internal grants
2025 COM-T Faculty excellence award - Basic Science - Translational Investigator
2025 Research featured on NPR KJZZ
2021 Top Cited Author, Journal of Endocrinology
Internationally and Nationally recognized in the aging and metabolism fields
- Recent invited talks:
  - Translational Medicine for Cardiometabolic Diseases - Copenhagen, 2025
  - Masoro-Barshop Conference on Aging - Texas 2025
  - European Association for the Study of Diabetes - Madrid 2024

Meet Sarah Pungitore, PhD!
Assistant Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine

Developed LLM for Cerner EHR for computational phenotyping to create digital twin models:
- Respiratory failure interventions
- Pulmonary hypertension therapy
- Noninvasive assessment of complex respiratory mechanics
Designed community-level pandemic surveillance models
Analysis of Human-AI interaction in clinical decision making.

Why you should know Dr. Pungitore:

AI data scientists will be crucial key members of research teams
AI data scientists understand WHY an AI generated model is or isn't appropriate for specific scenarios
AI data scientists are extremely helpful in understanding why surprising AI-generated results might be occurring.

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