Research Scientist

Zach joined IHMC as a Research Scientist in 2021 and is a Health Science Research Specialist at the Birmingham VA Health Care System. He is very interested in how exercise can be implemented to improve the health and quality of life of individuals across disease states and the lifespan. His group uses multiomic profiling to find novel molecular mechanisms and phenotypes that help guide individualized exercise prescriptions or more precise rehabilitation strategies. Spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s disease and aging are a few of his main research interests. He maintains an active pre-clinical line of research focused on muscle biology following spinal cord injury, predominantly focused on the role of connexin hemichannels in accelerating muscle dysfunction.

He  received a bachelor’s degree in Spanish from The Ohio State University in 2007 and a master’s and Ph.D, from the University of Kansas in 2010 and 2014. respectively. He completed my postdoctoral training in muscle physiology from 2014-2018 at the National Center for the Medical Consequences of Spinal Cord Injury at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx, NY, after which he joined the Birmingham VA Health Care System.