Title: Professor
Chemistry, Hybrid PMED

Biography:
Kishore K. Bagga has been teaching at Drexel University College of Medicine, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and Professional Studies since 2009 in various divisional programs, one of which houses the PMED program: in-person as well as hybrid. In this program, the class is taken through a comprehensive, detailed study of general chemistry (I) and (II) as well as organic chemistry (I) and (II) each with a lab component. Concepts are discussed during in-person lab meetings (besides performing the labs). The class is engaged during meeting time, using active learning approaches allowing for an understanding of the concepts and allowing for application of these to the real world.

Since 2013, he has been developing online educational resources such as pre-recorded videos for both general chemistry as well as organic chemistry. He has an interest in chemical education and has presented regularly at American Chemical Society conferences, a number of these presentations had student involvement. He enjoys asking questions in class and encouraging the students to participate to solve the question, which may involve working out using pen and paper. He likes to give small group-based activities, readiness assessment tests, as well as poll questions to assess his student learning.

The lab facilities are housed in the newly built Health Sciences Building providing an excellent learning environment along with the resources application of a number of concepts through labs. He thoroughly enjoys talking chemistry and provides a challenging, as well as supportive and mentoring, atmosphere. Besides teaching, he also has research interests which involve natural product chemistry and their bioactivities, as well as chemical education. Besides, his teaching and research interests, he is an active member of the American Chemical Society as well as the Royal Society of Chemistry and continues to serve in various capacities at the national and international committees level.

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Title: Professor
Biology, Traditional PMED

Title: Professor
Chemistry, Traditional PMED

Biography:
Dr. Dian He moved to the greater Philadelphia area after receiving his PhD in organic chemistry from The Ohio State University in 2008. Currently he works as an associate professor of chemistry at Holy Family University in northeast Philadelphia. He is responsible for the instruction of general chemistry and organic chemistry in the PMED program. Besides teaching, Dr. He also enjoys manipulating proteins, DNAs and ligands in virtual spaces and watching them interacting with each other using molecular dynamics.

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Title: Professor
Biochemistry, Traditional and Hybrid PMED

Biography:
In 1972, I matriculated to a small liberal arts college in Vermont, Marlboro College, home of the Marlboro Music Festival. I graduated with honors in 1976 with a dual major in anthropology and organic chemistry. Upon graduation, I moved to Munich, Germany. For two years, I played music at local night clubs and learned German. I had briefly considered pursuing medicine but decided upon research in biochemistry/molecular biology. I applied to and was accepted into the PhD program in molecular biology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Initially, I researched the kinetic role of blood coagulation Factor V in clotting. Although interesting, I decided not to continue in enzyme kinetics. I wrote up my research for a Masters thesis and moved on to polio virus research with Professor Eckard Wimmer. I became involved in a new research project looking at the possibility of developing a synthetic (peptide) vaccine against polio virus. I graduated from Stony Brook in 1986 with a PhD in molecular biology. The success of the synthetic vaccine project helped me to get a post-doctoral fellowship from the World Health Organization to work at the Max von Pettenkofer Institute (University of Munich) in Munich, Germany. At the Pettenkofer Institute, I worked on developing a synthetic vaccine for hepatitis A virus. A year and a half after beginning my work at the Pettenkofer, I was recruited by Dr. Leroy Hood to work in his laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena CA. At that time, the virus (HIV) causing the AIDS outbreaks had just been isolated and it was known that it used CD4 on T cells as a receptor. I was put on a project to use synthetic peptides to map the site used by HIV to gain entry into the T cells. The problem with project was that I only had the primary sequence of CD4 and needed to have a relative idea of its 3-D structure. Lee Hood suggested that I talk to Bill Goddard in the Chemistry Department who had developed computational chemistry software and might be able to help me make a molecular model of CD4. Bill, very graciously took me under his wing and helped me make a homology model of CD4; this solved my problems. We published the results in Science.

The Director of the Fels Cancer Institute, Carlo Croce, recruited me as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at the Temple University School of Medicine. The following year, Carlo was recruited to become Director of Thomas Jefferson’s new cancer center housed in the new Bluemle Life Sciences building; We all moved to Jefferson. As an independent investigator, my research focused on structure-based design of CD4 analogs as a potential treatment for autoimmune diseases. I remained at Jefferson for a little over 4 years. I was then recruited to become Executive Director of Research at a medium-sized biotechnology company, Ares-Serono (now Merck) in Boston. I missed academia. Two years later, I accepted a position at MCP-Hahnemann University (which eventually became Drexel University College of Medicine). About 14-years ago, my departmental chair, Dr. Jane Clifford, asked me if I would consider moving to full-time education. I agreed and became Director of Medical Biochemistry at the medical school. Recently, I spent several years training Dr. Todd Strochlich to take over my position as director of the Medical Biochemistry. Two years ago, he took over and I am now primarily devoting my time to teaching Medical Biochemistry to the DPMS, IMS and MBS programs in addition to teaching a Biochemistry and Molecular Biology course designed to help PMED students prepare for the MCAT.

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Title: Professor
Math, Traditional and Hybrid PMED

Biography:
Klimas, a mathematics professor for over ten years, recieved her Doctor of Arts degree in mathematics from Idaho State University in 2017. In 2015, her article, "Oscillation and integral norms of coefficients in second-order differential equations" was published in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications.

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Title: Professor
Physics, Hybrid PMED

Biography:
Christina Love, PhD, earned her BS in physics education from West Chester University in 2006. She went on to graduate school at Temple University and earned her MA and PhD in physics where her research was focused on experimental particle astrophysics and the search for dark matter. She was then appointed to a postdoctoral fellowship with the Department of Homeland Security working on the detection of explosives with X-ray scanners.

Currently, she is an associate teaching professor at Drexel University where she coordinates an annual outreach event that exposes hundreds of high school students to recent discoveries in physics. Love is a member of the IceCube Collaboration, a past president for the Philadelphia Chapter of the Association for Women in Science, and she is the Director for Start Talking Science, a free public event where STEM researchers present non-technical posters to the general public. Love has over 50 scientific publications and presentations and has performed research at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy.

Love has taught over 20 distinct courses to almost every type of major, including physics, business, fashion design, engineering and biology – to name a few. Her courses range from 100-level introductory conceptual courses to 400-level year-long senior research courses. She is the recipient of the Drexel University Evidence-Based Teaching Award in Undergraduate STEM Education and the Drexel Graduate Student Association's Award for Outstanding Faculty Mentor.

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Title: Professor
Physics, Traditional PMED

Biography:
Dr. Douglas Vallette is an adjunct professor of physics in Drexel University's PMED program. Dr. Vallette received his BS in physics from Drexel University in 1989 and he is happy to be giving back to his alma mater! He received his PhD in physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, where he studied pattern formation in nonlinear dynamical systems. Since his university education, he has taught high school physics and has become involved in developing effective professional development for physics and physical science teachers. This included workshops for physics teacher through the Modeling Instruction program, an inquiry-based approach to physics education. He has also worked in collaboration with the 21st Century Partnership for Stem Education under a USAID grant to develop a new STEM school system for high school students in Egypt. Most recently, a subsequent grant has included the development of new inquiry-based courses of study for training future science teachers in the Egyptian state university system. He enjoys finding relevant ways to make science practical for the students in his classroom and currently teaches the introductory in-person Physics 1 and Physics 2 classes.