Manoj Sharma, MBBS, Ph.D., MCHES® is a public health physician and educator with a medical degree from the University of Delhi and a doctorate in Preventive Medicine (Public Health) from The Ohio State University. He is also a Master Certified Health Education Specialist certified by the National Commission on Health Education Credentialing. He is currently a tenured Full Professor & Chair of the Social & Behavioral Health Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in the School of Public Health. He is a prolific researcher and as of June 2023 had published 15 books, over 375 peer-reviewed research articles, and over 500 other publications (h-index 51, i-10 index over 200, and over 13,000 citations) and secured funding for over $10 million. He is ranked in the top one percentile of global scientists from 176 subfields by Elsevier.His research interests are in developing and evaluating theory-based health behavior change interventions, obesity prevention, stress-coping, community-based participatory research/evaluation, and integrative mind-body-spirit interventions.

Xiaoliang Wang

Dr. Wang’s overarching research theme is to understand air pollutant emissions, transformations, and impacts. Specifically, his research interests include physical and chemical characterization of aerosols, pollution source emission measurement, and aerosol instrument development.
Dr. Wang has developed several widely used aerosol instruments. He is a co-inventor of nanoparticle aerodynamic lenses for efficiently delivering particles into aerosol mass spectrometers and the TSI DustTrak DRX Aerosol Monitor for measuring size-segregated aerosol mass concentrations in real time. He led the design of the DRI Portable Emissions Measurement System (PEMS) that has been used for characterizing gases and particles from vehicle exhaust, stack emissions, biomass burning, and biomass-derived syngas. Dr. Wang also led the design of the DRI Model 2015 Multiwavelength Thermal/Optical Carbon Analyzer that has been commercialized and used worldwide.
Dr. Wang has been studying real-world emissions from pollution sources with the goal of improving air quality management. His projects include researching dust emissions in underground coal mines, tailpipe and non-tailpipe (i.e., brake and tire wear, as well as road dust) emissions from vehicle traffic, toxic gas and particle emissions from the open burning of household solid waste in South Africa, smoke emissions from burning lithium-ion batteries and spacecraft-relevant materials, and mining fleet/industrial stack/fugitive dust emissions in the oil sands region of Canada. Recently, he participated in several projects to study the impact of visibility, air quality, and atmospheric deposition of particles generated from wildfires and prescribed burns in the Lake Tahoe Basin.
Dr. Wang is an active participant in several scientific organizations. He conducts peer reviews for scientific publications and funding agencies. He served as co-chair and chair of the Instrumentation Working Group of the American Association of Aerosol Research (AAAR) annual conferences and chair of the Young Investigators Committee of the AAAR.
Dr. Wang has been granted three patents and published three book chapters and 90+ peer-reviewed journal articles. He is the recipient of the 2020 AAAR Benjamin Y. H. Liu Award that recognizes outstanding contributions to aerosol instrumentation and experimental techniques. Most recently, he received the 2021 DRI Science Medal for his outstanding scientific contributions.

Derek Kauneckis

Dr. Derek Kauneckis is an affiliated associate research faculty in the Division of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences at the Desert Research Institute and associate professor of environmental studies at Ohio University. His research focuses on regional environmental governance, how people interact with environmental resources, and the emergence of cooperative institutions. He has examined behavioral and institutional components of resilience planning, climate policy networks, and the role of technology in the science/policy interface. His research has been published in the Journal of Coastal Management, Simulation & Gaming, Environmental Management, Studies in Comparative International Development, Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, among others. Dr. Kauneckis currently serves as an Advisory Committee Member for the Department of Homeland Security’s Resilient Investment Planning and Development Working Group, and leads the Advisory Group on Professional Education for the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP). Dr. Kauneckis’ research has been sponsored by Fulbright, National Science Foundation (NSF), National Oceans and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Department of Agriculture (USDA), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Lazaro Perez

My work seeks to identify and understand the coupling between physical heterogeneity and biochemical processes that control environmental biogeochemical reactions, energy, and mass transfer processes in the environment. We design and implement multiscale laboratory experiments visualization and numerical modeling.
My research is highly collaborative and multidisciplinary that provides domain expertise in scale biogeochemistry, reactive transport processes, multiphase flow systems, lab-to-field-scale hydrogeology, and computational geochemistry.

Monika Gulia-Nuss

The long-term interest of my research program is to understand the biology of disease vectors to identify novel strategies for vector control and pathogen transmission. My lab focuses on two arthropod vectors of human diseases: mosquitoes and ticks. Our research spans multiple disciplines, including ecology, biochemistry and physiology, genetics, genomics, and computational biology, to investigate questions related to arthropod biology. We employ techniques that encompass molecular, cellular, and organismal levels of studies. Since setting up my lab at UNR in 2016, the most significant research contributions of my program have been 1) pioneering an embryo injection protocol for ticks, 2) the first successful use of CRISPR/Cas9-based genome editing in ticks, 3) producing the first chromosome-level genome assembly for a tick species, and 4) adapting and optimizing a RADseq protocol (Rapture) for genome-wide markers to understand population genetic structure of mosquitoes and ticks. In addition, we have recently initiated a project for the identification of biomarkers for early diagnostics of Lyme disease.

M. Rashed Khan

Khan Lab@UNR aims to study, design, and develop soft materials, unconventional processes, and reconfigurable micro/nanodevices that can be harnessed and optimized further for advanced biochemical, biomedical, and physicochemical applications. The lab is also keen to establish a multidisciplinary smart-manufacturing research group, including researchers from various backgrounds. Through short and long-term active collaboration, Khan Lab@UNR would like to address fundamental challenges associated with soft micro-device fabrication, 3D/4D (bio)printing, and patterning, advanced hybrid sensor manufacturing, biomedical device development – which are still unnoticed and under-explored, and need further investigation.

Additionally, our group also focuses on computational neuroscience and neurobioengineering. Under this research direction, we study human brain, brain functions, brain structure so that the established knowledge can be broadly applicable to general biomecical science and knowledge of the brain and brain-diseases.

Douglas Sims

Douglas Sims is Dean, School of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics at the College of Southern Nevada. He leads a school of more than 280 staff (FT and PT) serving 18000+ students. His focus is in sediments, geochemistry, environmental chemistry, and paleohydrology in the Southern Great Basin and Mojave Desert. Current projects are paleohydrology of desert playas, trace metals scavenging by rock varnish, surface water quality, and sediment migration and transport of trace metals in agricultural soils.

Erin Hannon

Erin Hannon is faculty in the Psychological and Brain Sciences department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She received a Ph.D. Experimental Psychology in 2005 from Cornell University. Her research program combines her interests in cognition, culture, infant and child development, music and dance, and language. Her research examines how an individual’s culture-specific listening experiences influence his or her perception of music, the similarities and differences between musical and linguistic skills as they develop and perhaps interact during infancy and childhood, how we acquire the ability to move in time with music, and how developmental milestones in music perception might be related to other social, cognitive, and linguistic abilities and behaviors.

Zhange Feng