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Professor Ning Quan

Professor Ning Quan

Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

Dr. Quan is a Professor at the Florida Atlantic University where he serves as a member of the Brain Institute and the Department of Biomedical Science in the College of Medicine. During his PhD thesis research, he demonstrated a hypothermic effect of norepinephrine in the preoptic area of the hypothalamus. As a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University, he demonstrated the existence of IL-1 bioactivity in normal brain, linking this inflammatory cytokine to physiological neural functions of the central nervous system (CNS). During his research fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health, he demonstrated that the blood brain barrier can serve as a relay of neuroimmune communication, transmitting peripheral immune signal to the brain.

Dr. Quan's past research at the Ohio State University focused on understanding the communication pathways between the immune system and the CNS and the neural functions of the mediators of neuroimmune communication. He demonstrated a role for proinflammatory cytokines in mediating neurodegeneration induced by the chronic CNS infection of Trypanosoma brucei, described the temporospatial distribution of IL-1 and COX-2 expression after peripheral immune challenge, uncovered a location-specific neural pathway by which localized peripheral inflammation signals brain, discovered multiple promoters in the IL-1R1 gene that drives cell type specific expression of IL-1R1 in the CNS to mediate diverse functions of IL-1 in the brain, leading to the identification of IL-1R3.

His current research includes further dissecting the role of IL-1R1 and COX-2 in the brain by creating and analyzing mouse lines which express these molecules in specific cell types of the brain, elucidating mechanisms underlying a novel type of peripheral inflammation recently discovered in his lab-inflammation without the induction of sickness behaviors and neuroimmune activation, and exploring the potential clinical benefits of this type of inflammation.

At national and international levels, Dr. Quan has served as a member and chairman of multiple NIH study sections, a member of grant review panels for UK and Canada and on the editorial boards of multiple journals.

Updated 19 September 2023