Two Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) faculty members have been awarded $750,000 grants each through the OHSU Faculty Excellence and Innovation Awards. These awards recognize creative research with the potential to advance human health. Funded by the Silver Family Innovation Fund, the awards are distributed over three years and support early- and middle-stage research.
Award Recipients
The 2026 recipients are:
- Alireza Karimi, Ph.D. Assistant professor of ophthalmology in the OHSU Casey Eye Institute.
- Elizabeth Moss, Ph.D. Assistant professor of anesthesiology and perioperative medicine in the OHSU School of Medicine.
Bonnie Nagel, OHSU interim chief research officer, noted that these scientists are addressing challenges such as irreversible blindness from glaucoma and cognitive decline in neurodegenerative disorders.
Research Focus
Alireza Karimi, Ph.D.
Karimi's research focuses on glaucoma, a condition affecting over 80 million people globally, which involves increased eye pressure due to a malfunctioning natural drainage system. Current treatments manage pressure but do not resolve the underlying issue.
His goal is to develop a one-time treatment that restores the eye's natural ability to regulate pressure, moving beyond lifelong eye drops or repeated surgeries.
Karimi's methodology combines engineering, computer modeling, biology, and genetics. His lab developed an "outflow-on-a-chip" device to mimic the eye's drainage system, which is used to identify pressure-sensing components that fail in glaucoma. The team is testing gene-editing and drug-based treatments to repair these components. He is also a co-founder of OutFlowGen, a startup developing gene therapies for vision preservation.
Elizabeth Moss, Ph.D.
Moss investigates how the brain processes sensory information and creates meaningful experiences. Using the sense of smell in mice as a model, her research examines how individual and groups of brain cells process signals, and how factors like attention influence these processes. The objective is to understand how the brain maintains flexibility and responsiveness across various situations.
Her work has implications for understanding neurodegenerative disorders.
The loss of smell is an early indicator of diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
By clarifying how healthy brain circuits adapt, Moss's research may contribute to understanding what goes wrong in these conditions and inform new detection or treatment strategies. Her earlier work demonstrated that smells are encoded by neural activity patterns and that the brain briefly retains odor information to aid memory and distinction.