Freeman Lab

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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.

Adeline Machalinski

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

Kevin Pham

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

Walker Hoolehan, PhD

Dr. Hoolehan is a post-doctoral fellow studying epigenetic mechanisms of aging and developing new sequencing approaches to examine the epigenome.

Brianna Cyr, PhD

Brianna is a post-doctoral scientist studying the role of MHC-I in microglial reactivity during aging and in the development and progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

Adam Kulpa, MS

Adam is a PhD student that explores the intersection of aging, methylation, and epigenetic engineering in microglia to unravel the molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration.

Hannah Ray

Hannah supports experimental procedures and data analysis to advance our research initiatives.

Charlie Burnett

Charlie helps with running the nanopore sequencer and the data analysis of nanopore data.

Affiliates

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.

Collyn Kellogg, PhD

M.D./Ph.D. student Collyn Kellogg works on neuroinflammatory mechanisms of traumatic brain injury and the role of microglial MHC-I in brain aging.

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