Dr. Brenda Schoffstall
Biology Department
Brenda Schoffstall, PhD (Florida State University, Molecular Biophysics), is a professor and assistant chair for Barry University’s Biology Department. Her current research program at Barry focuses on the study of muscle tissue regeneration via myocyte proliferation using a zebrafish model. She and her undergraduate research team hope to discover a “molecular proliferation switch” that can be used to turn on muscle cell division to repair damaged hearts or damaged skeletal muscle. If this proliferation switch can be identified in zebrafish, findings can be translated into treatments for heart damage or muscle damage in the human body, where damaged muscle is typically replaced with non-functional scar tissue.
In the pursuit of this ultimate goal, the two projects currently underway in her lab are: (1) The Molecular Response of Zebrafish Hearts to Excessive Cardiac Overload Stress and (2) The Wound Healing Response in Adult Danio rerio.
Dr. Schoffstall is passionate about training students to love scientific research as a career and typically has a lab group of eight to 10 undergraduate student researchers working in her lab each semester.
Prior to coming to Barry, Dr. Schoffstall held a post-doctoral position at FSU in electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) at the Institute of Molecular Biophysics and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee.