Lab Members

Willard Freeman PhD

Bill Freeman is a member of the Genes and Disease Program at OMRF and a Research Scientist at the OKC Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Dr. Freeman received his BAs in Chemistry and English and PhD in Pharmacology from Wake Forest University. He was then a post-doctoral fellow at the Vollum Institute of Oregon Health Sciences University and Yerkes National Primate Center at Emory University prior to joining the faculty at Penn State University. Dr. Freeman’s lab works on epigenetic and neuroinflammatory mechanisms of brain aging. Recent epigenetic studies by his group have identified non-CpG methylation as the majority of age-related changes in the CNS, described that age-related changes in methylation patterns are sexually divergent in mice and humans, demonstrated that caloric restriction prevents age-related DNA modifications, and developed novel sequencing and analysis tools for DNA modification analysis.

David Stanford PhD

Dr. Stanford specializes in bioinformatic analyses for group projects and assists in the Nathan Shock Center Targeted DNA Methylation and Mitochondrial Heteroplasmy Core. This work spans the gammut of sequencing data analysis from mitochondrial sequencing to methylation analysis.

Ana Chucair-Elliott PhD

Dr. Chucair-Elliott received her BS and PhD in Biochemistry degrees from the Universidad Nacional del Sur (Bahia Blanca, Argentina). Since then, she was a post-doctoral fellow and subsequently a research-track faculty in the Department of Ophthalmology at OUHSC, where she continued to focus her interest on mechanisms affecting neurodegeneration, neuroprotection, and neuroregeneration. Dr. Chucair-Elliot joined the group in 2018. Her work is focused on development of cell-type specific inducible transgenic mouse models for paired epigenomic and transcriptomic studies. She also leads the tissue imaging efforts in the laboratory.

Adeline Machalinski

Adeline is our mouse expert who manages our colony and ensures the safety and well being of our animals.

Hunter Porter

Hunter is a Neuroscience graduate student with a research interest in data aggregation and analysis of public methylation datasets. Currently, Hunter has amassed one of the largest databases of annotation human methylation data for analysis of aging clocks and comparisons to animal model data.

Sarah Ocanas

Sarah is a Physiology student working on single cell RNA sequencing, methylation/hydroxymethylation regulation, and chromsomsal regulation of sex differences. Sarah is also TV famous but we are not saying anything more than that.

Kyla Buettner

Kyla received her BS in Biotechnology from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, with minors in Bioinformatics and Chemistry. She is now a Physiology graduate student with interests in transposon epigenetics and genome instability associated with aging

Victor Ansere

Victor is a graduate student in the Physiology program working on animal models of anti-aging therapies.

Robyn Berent

Robyn is the lab manager and keeps us in good shape to do our science.

Michael Van Der Veldt

Michael works on molecular analyses for lab projects and collaborations through the Genomic Sciences Core of the NIA Oklahoma Nathan Shock Center

Kevin Pham

Kevin works on a variety of projects including being the resident 'cell whisperer' for isolating specific cell types from brain tissue.