Investigative Leadership Team
Meet our team
Chandan K. Sen, PhD, is distinguished professor and J. Stanley Battersby Chair of Surgery, Director of the Indiana Center for Regenerative Medicine and Engineering (ICRME), and executive director of the Comprehensive Wound Care Center at IU Methodist Hospital. At IU, he serves as associate vice president of research. At Indiana University Health, Dr. Sen is the executive director of the Comprehensive Wound Care Center. Dr. Sen is recognized as a Lilly INCITE Scholar.
The overriding theme that covers the research interests of the Sen laboratory across programs is tissue injury and repair. This overarching umbrella includes:
- regenerative medicine and cell-based therapies
- stroke
- tissue injury and repair
- miRNA in injury and repair
- cell and tissue reprogramming
- redox signaling
- wound healing
- tissue oxygenation
- wound epigenetics
- and biofilm infection
He is a widely recognized expert in regenerative medicine and wound healing. His research group works across a comprehensive platform covering basic cell culture to small animal and large animal models to human and patient-based research. Dr. Sen is continually opening up exciting new frontiers in regenerative medicine and is a leading example of a successful and altruistic scientist whose work is improving healthcare and the quality of patient lives globally.
Dr. Sen is joined by the following multidisciplinary leadership team to advance understanding of human post-mortem tissue response.
Principal Investigator: Chandan K. Sen, PhD
Scientific Administrator: Shomita Steiner, PhD
Analytics: Sashwati Roy, PhD and Kanhaiya Singh, PhD, IU School of Medicine Department of Surgery
Tissue Procurement: George E. Sandusky, DVM, PhD, IU School of Medicine Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
Philosophy and Bioethics: Peter H. Schwartz, MD, PhD, IU Center for Bioethics; Amit Hagar, PhD, IU College of Arts + Sciences’ Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine; and Tim O’Connor, MA, PhD, College of Arts + Sciences’ Cognitive Science Program
Visit Dr. Hagar’s website
Read “Breakthrough,” an article about Dr. Hagar’s career.
Dr. O’Connor will explore the implications of the striking cellular phenomena under study for philosophical questions concerning the unity of biological organisms, the nature of death and the interplay between ’top down’ and ‘bottom up’ causal processes in the human organism.
Visit Dr. Connor’s website
His lab will lead the tissue procurement team and be responsible for reviewing the histology of each case.
Dr. Schwartz conducts research and writes about ethical issues in many areas, including shared decision-making, precision health, health information, and ideas of health, disease, and risk. He leads research projects on patient decision-making and risk communication in preventive and precision healthcare, with previous funding from the American Cancer Society and the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute. He is currently the principal investigator of a project examining the impact of providing personalized risk information to patients due for colorectal cancer screening, and to their providers, funded by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).
Dr. Schwartz will analyze the ethical and philosophical implications of the scientific findings of this project and support further discussion and broader understanding of these topics.
Visit Dr. Schwartz’s website
Dr. Singh will use his expertise in high throughput single cell genomics that will be applied to the proposed studies. He will be primarily responsible for experimental design and analyses of data generated from post-mortem samples. He will closely work with doctors Sen, Roy and Wan and actively participate in generating data, writing reports and manuscripts and presenting research.
Dr. Wan’s research interests are in bioinformatics and computational systems biology. His lab uses diverse approaches to investigate gene regulation, associated biological pathways, and functionally networks from transcriptional level to translational level. In particular, he focuses on deciphering epigenetic codes to understand impacts of genetic mutations and epigenetic variations on dynamic gene regulatory networks. Since 2007, he has been conducting studies of gene regulation mechanisms from multiple dimensions, including transcription factor regulation, DNA methylation, alternative splicing, microRNA regulation, histone modifications and genome-wide chromatin organizations. In addition, his lab works on public domain data to integrate a wide variety of ‘-omics’ datasets to explore comprehensive patterns of gene regulatory networks. Serving as director of Collaborative Core for Cancer Bioinformatics (C3B) shared by Indiana University Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center (IUSCCC) and Purdue University Center for Cancer Research, Wan now oversees the bioinformatics analyses and training through the C3B. Meanwhile, he engages to develop diverse, cutting-edge analyses on next-generation sequencing (NGS) data and other omics data, such as RNA-Seq, single cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq), ChIP-Seq, ATAC-seq, single cell ATAC-seq (scATAC-seq), Whole Genome Bisulfite Sequencing (WGBS), Whole genome/exome sequencing and CRISPR/CAS9, among others.
In the Templeton project, Jun Wan supervises bioinformatics analysis and leads the method development to analyze the data and improve biologists’ hypothesis.
Learn about the Wan Lab, or read Dr. Wan’s bio.