The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) has named two USF Health Morsani College of Medicine faculty members – Loree Heller, PhD, and Juan Sanchez-Ramos, PhD, MD — to its new class of Senior Members.
They are among six University of South Florida faculty members newly elected to the latest NAI Senior Member class. These Senior Members have devoted their careers to inventing high-tech tools for a myriad of applications and blazing a trail for the next generation of innovators.
No university in the country has more inventors named to this year’s class than USF. For information on all the USF faculty members recently selected, click here.
NAI Senior Members are active faculty, scientists and administrators from NAI member institutions who have demonstrated remarkable innovation producing technologies that have brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society. They also have proven success in patents, licensing and commercialization.
Dr. Heller is an associate professor in the USF Health Department of Medical Engineering, a joint department of the Morsani College of Medicine and the College of Engineering at USF. Her research has focused on molecular microbiology, the evaluation of antibiotic alternatives and the bio-effects of gene therapies delivered by physical methods.
She was the first to discover that complete tumor regression of solid tumors can occur when control backbone pDNA is electroporated into different tumor types. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal agencies. She has patented research in molecular pathogen detection; her patents in gene therapy development have been licensed by two companies and include translation into clinical trials.
Dr. Sanchez-Ramos is the Helen Ellis Endowed Professor in the USF Health Department of Neurology. His neuroscience research has included studies of drug dependence, toxicant-induced neurodegeneration, stem cell biology, and novel approaches for delivery of gene therapy. His research team discovered the Huntington’s disease gene in 1992.
His numerous awards include an NIH Clinical Investigator Development Award to start his research lab, the Helen E. Ellis Endowed Chair for Parkinson’s Disease Research, the USF McNair Scholars Faculty Research Mentor Award, and the USF Outstanding Faculty Research Achievement Award. He has been awarded 8 U.S. patents and authored over 300 publications.