Dr. Simon received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego in 1988. Postdoctoral training in Immunology and Inflammation Biology was initiated at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, and was completed at the National Flow Cytometry Resource at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He then joined the faculty at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine’s Section of Leukocyte Biology, Dept of Pediatrics in Houston, TX, where he remained for 7 years. Dr. Simon was recruited as one of the founding faculty in a new Biomedical Engineering department at UC Davis in 1999, and rapidly rose to the rank of full Professor in 2002. He currently serves as Vice Chair of the department and Deputy Editor of the Annals of Biomedical Engineering. Recently he stepped down as a member on the NIH Bioengineering Technology and Surgical Sciences study section and now serves on the College of CSR Reviewers for the NIH. He has also personally trained more than one dozen graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.
He has a longstanding interest in the mechanisms governing leukocyte adhesion and signaling during inflammatory disease. An Established Investigator of the American Heart Association, his work focuses on structure-function studies of integrin and selectin receptors and vascular dysfunction during atherosclerosis. His laboratory was the first to discover the signaling functions of L-selectin and E-selectin. More recently, his group has developed novel microfluidic vascular mimetic systems that provide real time imaging of force and molecular dynamics in leukocyte-endothelial interactions in shear flow. A recently funded project on atherogenesis aims to develop lab-on-a-chip devices to gauge the inflammatory potential of native lipoproteins and molecular events underlying monocyte recruitment to endothelium conditioned with lipids collected from normal and metabolic syndrome subjects. These approaches provide low cost, real time tools to study the tissue level consequences and biomarkers in order to assess disease progression.
