Nathan Wood

Email: contact@nwoodweb.xyz Emails will be signed.

IRC (Libera): nawo or nawoweb

Other Home Pages: Google Scholar, ResearchGate, SciProfiles

Curriculum Vitae (PDF): https://www.nwoodweb.com/woodnCV.pdf

My name is Nathan Wood and I am currently a graduate student in Dr. Hongmin Qin’s Group at Texas A&M Department of Biology.

In the Qin Group, I helped quickly establish rooms and apparatus, and protocols, for a quick transition from vascular plant and Chlamydomonas research to human cell culture in accordance with a recently earned US Department of Defence Grant. For the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), we seek to gain a better understanding of how extreme environmental stressors impact lung cells, at this moment immortalized bronchial epithelial and microvascular endothelial cells.

As part of this, I head a group of two students seeking their Master's Degrees as well as five undergraduate students in order to address how cells respond to extracellular stressors. We also have collaborations with research groups in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering to implement 3D bioprinting and label-free imaging as a means to address these problems.

Academic Research Interests

I seek to elucidate:

• How the cytoskeleton of 16HBE14o- human bronchial epithelial cells is altered under extreme extracellular pH, and its role in altering collective cell behavior.
• The role of Acid Sensing Ion Channels (ASICs), Transient Receptor Potential Canonical (TRPC), and Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid (TRPV) in governing collective cell behavior under extreme extracellular pH.
• The presence of Tunneling Nanotube (TNT) formation in 16HBE14o-, and the contributions of extracellular pH on TNT formation.

I seek to address these questions using a variety of techniques, including:

• 3D cell culture
• Live cell imaging
• Genetic and Pharmacological interventions

I also participate in interdisciplinary collaboration in order to leverage advanced techniques and emerging methods, including:

• 3D bioprinting to improve the scalability of 3D cell culture techniques
• Brillouin Microscopy to identify gross shifts in the cell's physiology via changes in cell stiffness
• Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging of cofactors NAD and FAD

Personal Interests

• Amateur radio. In particular antennas, digital communications, phone, and QRP
• SKYWARN
• Mathematics. In particular dynamical systems, linear algebra, modeling, and numerical methods
• Computer graphics
• Computer hardware-software interface
• Reading. Lots of nonfiction. Regardless my favorite authors include H.P. Lovecraft and Franz Kafka.
• Unix