Comparative Medicine & Health Outcomes

Comparative Medicine & Health Outcomes are growing areas of scientific interest requiring unique, specialized expertise and technologies.

The Comparative Medicine and Health Outcomes (CMHO) Scientific Unit includes three focus areas: Aging and Development, Behavioral Neuroscience, and Metabolic Diseases. The goals of this unit are to facilitate and enhance research programs exploring comparative health and to examine correlates of disease susceptibility and resistance in NHP models.

The mission of this unit is to pursue excellence in basic and translational research and serve as a national resource for training next generation primate researchers while enhancing animal resources at the SNPRC. This unit is focused on supporting resource expansion in comparative medicine and health outcomes to address complex systems biology questions spanning life from prenatal to aged subjects. We bring together excellence in aging research, animal science, clinical welfare, developmental models, metabolic disease monitoring, neuroscience and behavior. These research topics have contributed to the training of a large body of graduate, undergraduate, rotation and summer students as well as postdoctoral and visiting scientists from national and international institutions. Our core scientists also participate in numerous outreach activities, educational and intern summer programs, and facilitate research projects with external investigators to promote the CMHO Unit as a national resource.

“The SNPRC nonhuman primate models, especially the baboon and marmoset colonies, offer a number of unique opportunities to evaluate questions in translational biomedicine. The strength of this unit is truly the interdisciplinary nature of the science necessary to evaluate health outcomes.  We continue to strive to develop new nonhuman primate models to meet the needs of comparative medicine studies,” said Corinna Ross, Ph.D, Director SNPRC.

Scientists and research veterinarians in the CMHO unit work closely with national and international collaborators.  Additionally, CMHO continues to support the well-established collaborative relationships with the Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies at the University of Texas Health San Antonio, University of Texas San Antonio, and the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. We facilitate and advise collaborative investigators, affiliate scientists and outside scientists to develop and implement nonhuman primate studies.

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Faculty

Unit Leads

Core Scientists

Affiliate Scientists