Board of Directors

President (2013-2014)
Paul Y. Liu, MD
Chairman
Rhode Island Hospital
Plastic Surgery
593 Eddy Street
APC Rm 418
Providence, RI 02903
401-444-5871 telephone
401-444-5716 fax
pliu@lifespan.org

Paul grew up in Colorado, graduated from The Colorado College with a degree in mathematics, then received a Marshall Fellowship for graduate studies at Oxford University, in the UK. He completed an Honors thesis in immunology, then went on to complete his MD at Harvard Medical School. A decade of surgical training followed, including a wound healing research fellowship in the lab of Elof Eriksson, and plastic surgery residency at the combined Harvard/Brigham/Children's program. His first academic posting was at the University of Miami, where he was Chief of Plastic Surgery at the Miami VA, and the Director of Research for the Division of Plastic Surgery. He was then appointed as a senior staff surgeon at The Lahey Clinic, in Burlington, MA, where he established a multidisciplinary wound center. He then was selected as Chairman of Surgery for Roger Williams Medical Center in Providence, RI, and is an Associate Professor of Surgery at both Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School. He is on the staff at both RWMC and the Brigham. His NIH-funded lab has developed AAV-vectors for angiogenic genes in flaps and wounds, and more recently, he has assembled an international team of mathematicians and wound healing researchers to model the healing of diabetic wounds. He has been a member of the WHS since the 90s, and co-chaired the Program Committee with Manuela Martins-Green for the 2008 meeting in San Diego, CA. He had served on the Program Committee for one term prior to that, and currently is Chair of the Publications Committee of the WHS, which oversees publication of Wound Repair and Regeneration. 

President Elect (2013-2014)
Lisa Gould, MD
Staff Surgeon
James A. Haley Veterans' Hospital
Department of Surgery
13000 Bruce B. Downs Blvd. (112)
Tampa FL 33612
813-972-2000, x6700 telephone
813-978-5936 fax
lisa.gould@va.gov

After earning her MD, PhD in the Medical Scholars Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Lisa Gould completed residencies in General Surgery and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Medical College of Virginia, followed by a Hand and Microsurgery fellowship at the Medical College of Wisconsin. During her residency training she spent 2 years in the Wound Healing Laboratory at the Medical College of Virginia, where she was made aware of how little is known about the pathobiology of wound healing. She saw the potential for research which could directly improve the care for patients suffering from chronic wounds. As Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Dr. Gould was a Fellow of the Sealy Center on Aging, co-director of the UTMB multidisciplinary wound clinic and a recipient of a Jahnigen Career Development award sponsored by the American Geriatric Society. She re-located to Tampa in 2007 and is Chief of Plastic Surgery at the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital, and Associate Professor in the Departments of Plastic Surgery and Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology at University of South Florida. She has a clinical and basic research focus on the role of age and oxidative stress on wound healing with funding through the VA Merit Review and DOD.

Vice President (2013-2014)
Andrew Baird, Ph.D 
Professor
University of California San Diego
Department of Surgery
Division of Trauma, Burns and Wounds
200 Arbor Drive, MC 8236
San Diego, CA 92103
619-471-0199 telephone
619-543-2325 fax
anbaird@ucsd.edu

Trained in Biochemistry (PhD, 1980) at McGill University in Montreal Canada, Dr Baird started as a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute with Roger Guillemin (Nobel,1977) in the early 1980s where he remained as junior faculty to 1989. At the Salk Institute, he carried out basic research on the control of cell growth and function that was to lead towards the first isolation and characterization of the first-ever angiogenic factor called basic fibroblast growth factor (FGF2). Later, at the Salk Institute and subsequently with The Scripps Research Institutes in San Diego, California, he was involved in characterizing the FGF high affinity receptor, sequencing the FGF low affinity receptor (heparan sulfate), identifying the FGF2 promoter, generating the first transgenic mouse over expressing the FGF gene and establishing the first structure-function studies characterizing FGF2 ligand-receptor interactions. With this information, he identified a series of FGF2 agonists and antagonists for wound healing. In 1995, he closed his academic laboratories and moved into the biotechnology sector, where for 7 years (1995-2001), he learned the process of pre-IND drug development including QA/QC, cGMP, manufacture and process development in the hope of better understanding why growth factors were not the huge biotherapeutic successes in angiogenesis, wound healing and tissue repair that were expected when first discovered. This experience turned his attention to the unique challenges of drug delivery for wound healing therapeutics and specifically, the temporal-spatial needs for multiple factors at multiple times. To this end he helped turn the companys research program from protein to gene therapeutics while developing new vectors for gene delivery, identifying new modes of gene targeting and discovering a small molecule inhibitor of macrophage migration inhibiting factor (MIF) that is currently in drug development by Novartis. In 2001, he returned to academia with a continued interest in drug discovery, development and deployment for injury and tissue repair. His laboratories currently work on drug delivery for wound healing and the development of techniques that can identify genes of the therapeutome: genes that encode proteins with direct and intrinsic therapeutic value to tissue repair. He currently leads an NIH Exploratory Center for Innovative Wound Healing Research in the Department of Surgery at University of California San Diego.

Treasurer (2006-2015)
Braham Shroot, PhD

Priority-Derm LLC,
1810 Barclay Boulevard,
Princeton, NJ 08540
609-356-4896 telephone
braham.shroot@gmail.com

Currently the CEO of Signum Biosciences, a private biotechnology company dedicated to developing small-molecule therapeutics derived from its Signal Transduction Modulation (STM) platform to modulate signal transduction imbalances.

Braham Shroot is the former CSO of Barrier Therapeutics, Inc., a public dermatology-focused pharmaceutical company, which was acquired by Stiefel Laboratories Inc., in August 2008. Prior to Barrier, Dr. Shroot was CSO and Vice President of R&D for DFB Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a fully integrated private specialty pharmaceutical company with a focus on skin, wound care, and surgical markets. Before DFB, Dr. Shroot was at L'Oreal where he was Group Leader and eventually Vice General Manager of the newly created Galderma entity which he helped to establish. Dr. Shroot earned his B.Sc. in Chemistry and Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at Glasgow University, Scotland, UK. He is also a board member of the Wound Healing Society, and associate Editor of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

Board Members

Barbara M. Bates-Jensen, Ph.D. (2012-2015)
Associate Professor
UCLA School of Nursing
5-954 Factor, 700 Tiverton Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-6919
626-437-8543 telephone
310-206-3241 fax
bbatesjensen@sonnet.ucla.edu

Barbara Bates-Jensen is Associate Professor of Nursing and Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles and National Associate Director for Pressure Ulcer Research and Implementation for the VA Spinal Cord Injury QUERI program in Chicago. Her research is focused on improving pressure ulcer and related wound care using technology and methods of translating research into practice. NIH funding supports her current work evaluating a non-visual method of detecting early pressure ulcers using a device that measures skin and tissue water or subepidermal moisture in nursing home residents. VA grants support her work with the same methods in veterans with spinal cord injury. She is also testing the measure in critical care patients. In conjunction with the Wireless Health Institute and two professors at UCLA she has invented a device to obtain these measures in real practice settings. She is the developer of a tool for chronic wound assessment, the Bates-Jensen Wound Assessment Tool, which is used worldwide and has been incorporated into a variety of electronic medical record systems. She is co-editor of the book, “Wound Care:  A Collaborative Practice Manual for Health Care Professionals” now in its 4^th edition, a board member of the Wound Healing Society and the Association for the Advancement of Wound Care, past Vice President of the National Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel, a consultant for CMS on pressure ulcer related areas, and a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing. She volunteered in Haiti after the earthquake and is the founder and President of the Bates-Jensen Wound Reach Foundation, a non-profit charity working to improve wound care globally.

Gayle Gordillo, MD (2011-2014)
Associate Professor of Surgery
The OSU Medical Center
Plastic Surgery
915 Olentangy River Rd
Suite 2100
Columbus, OH 43212
614-293-3748 telephone
614-293-9024 fax
gayle.gordillo@osumc.edu

Geoffrey C. Gurtner, MD (2012-2015)
Professor of Surgery
Stanford University School of Medicine
Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
257 Campus Drive
PSRL (Hagey Lab)
Stanford, CA 94305
650-724-6672 telephone
650-724-9501 fax
ggurtner@stanford.edu

Kenneth Liechty, MD (2011-2014)
Surgeon in Chief
Nemours Childrenʼs Hospital
Department of Surgery
9145 Narcoossee Road
Orlando, FL 32827
407-650-7818 telephone
kliechty@nemours.org

Dr. Kenneth Liechty is an Associate Professor and Vice Chairman for Research in the Department of Surgery at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and is the Director of The University Center for Fetal Medicine. His research has been focused primarily in the field of wound healing, with emphasis on elucidating the mechanisms involved in the regenerative response to injury in the fetus, the role of stem cells in tissue repair, and the correction of abnormal healing in the adult. His team has contributed significantly to the understanding of regenerative healing in the skin and tendon, and has recently developed and published the first report of mammalian cardiac regeneration in a large animal model following in utero myocardial infarction. He also has a strong interest in the use of stem cells to correct impaired healing in the adult. He and his team are developing novel treatment paradigms to promote healing and tissue regeneration in multiple tissues by modulating the inflammatory response, the composition of the extracellular matrix, and the progenitor cell content. The goal of this regenerative approach is to restore normal tissue architecture and function and prevent the complications of reparative healing or scar formation.

Olivera Stojadinovic, M.D. (2013-2015)

Dr. Olivera Stojadinovic is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Dermatology & Cutaneous Surgery at the University of Miami. Her entire research career starting from her post-doctoral training at the New York University School of Medicine, followed by the Hospital for Special Surgery of the Weill Cornell Medical College has been focused on the mechanisms controlling wound healing. Her work has broken new grounds in the field of chronic wounds defining the first molecular markers of the non-healing chronic wounds. Dr Stojadinovic’s current research interests focus on molecular mechanisms of innate and adaptive immunity in skin with an ultimate goal to translate new discoveries from bench to bedside. She has been supported by numerous NIH and industry sponsored grants. She has been an invited speaker and lecturer at National and International Meetings. Dr. Stojadinovic serves as a reviewer for several journals including Wound Repair and Regeneration, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Journal of Investigative Dermatology and Experimental Dermatology. She is an active member of Society of Investigative Dermatology and the Wound Healing Society since 2005. From the first day she joined the WHS she has taken an active role in WHS annual meetings and currently serves on the WHS Awards Committee and WHS Abstract Review Subcommittee. In addition she has taken the initiative to develop a Job Fair at this year’s meeting to help match up our members looking for jobs with perspective employers.

James Tomasek, Ph.D (2011-2014)
Professor and Dean of Graduate College
Univ of OK HSC
Dept. of Cell Biology
P.O. Box 26901 BMSB 553
Oklahoma City, OK 73104
(405) 271-2085 telephone
(405) 271-3548 fax
james-tomasek@ouhsc.edu

Dr. Tomasek is Dean of the Graduate College and the David Ross Boyd Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC). He received his B.S. in Biology from the University of Illinois and his Ph.D. in Biology from the State University of New York at Albany working in the area of limb development and epithelial-mesenchymal interactions. After three years as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School and a faculty position at New York Medical College Dr. Tomasek moved to OUHSC in the fall of 1988. Dr. Tomasek has been working on the molecular and cellular basis of wound healing and tissue repair and regeneration since 1985 and his research is funded by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Tomasek was a Burroughs-Wellcome Research Fellow at University College London in 1999, has been an invited speaker at numerous international symposia, and regularly serves as a reviewer for journals and both international and national review boards. He has received the Aesculapian Award and the Stanton L. Young Master Teacher Award for his teaching to medical students at OUHSC. He is currently a member of the Steering Committee for the Oklahoma Center for Adult Stem Cell Research. He has served as a member of the WHS Awards Committee and as Chair of the WHS Anita Roberts Awards Committee for the past three years. He has also has served as a member of the WHS Abstract Review Committee for the past two years.

Susan Volk, VMD, Ph.D

Susan W. Volk, VMD, PhD, Diplomate ACVS is an Assistant Professor of Small Animal Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania.  Dr. Volk earned both degrees in the Veterinary Medical Scientist Training Program and did her surgical residency at UPenn before assuming a faculty position in 2007. Her research is focused on the role of the ECM in modulating progenitor and reparative cell activities during tissue repair and evaluating the utility of adult stem cells to promote regenerative responses. This NIH, private foundation, and industry sponsored research has basic and translational components, including clinical trials in veterinary patients. Dr. Volk also maintains an active clinical practice and teaches veterinary students, residents and graduate students. She is an active member of several professional organizations and serves as a board member of the North American Veterinary Regenerative Medicine Association.

Since joining WHS in 2005, Dr. Volk has participated in the annual meeting as a presenter, moderator, and/or judge and has served on the Awards Committee for the last five years. As a Board member, her expertise with animal models, bench and clinical research, scholarly activities related to wound repair and regeneration, and dedication to education will allow her to advance the WHS mission.

Traci Wilgus, Ph.D (2013-15)

Dr. Wilgus is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at The Ohio State University. She earned her Ph.D. from Ohio State and completed post-doctoral training at Loyola University Medical Center. She was a junior faculty member at University of Illinois-Chicago before accepting a tenure-track position at Ohio State in 2008. Her lab studies the role of inflammation and angiogenesis in wound healing and skin carcinogenesis, and is particularly interested in scarless fetal healing. She currently receives funding from two NIH grants. Dr. Wilgus is an ad hoc reviewer for NIH and US Army research grants, and a permanent member of the Wound panel for the Military Infectious Diseases Research Program.

Dr. Wilgus joined the Wound Healing Society as a graduate student in 2000. She served on the Website Committee (2008-2011) and is currently a member of the Awards and Program Committees. For the past five years, she has reviewed abstracts, served as a moderator, and helped organized the Meet the Mentors session for the annual meeting. She frequently reviews manuscripts for the WHS journals Wound Repair and Regeneration and Advances in Wound Care, and sits on the editorial boards for Ostomy Wound Management and Advances in Wound Care.  

Representing Wound Repair and Regeneration on the Board of Directors

Contact Wound Healing Society

The Wound Healing Society
341 N. Maitland Ave., Suite 130
Maitland, Florida 32751
407-647-8839

Phil Pyster, CAE, President, Crow-Segal Mgmt. Co., Inc.
WHS Executive Director

Lyn Henderson, CMP
Assistant Executive Director

Mindy Hoo
Membership Director

Debbie Batchelor 
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Alison Hodges
Administration Assistance
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Bobby Davis
Editor

Lane Wadsworth
Graphic Design / Web Development

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