Dr. Verlie A. Tisdale, M.S. Ph.D.
Dr. Tisdale is the Chair of the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Her research interest is biochemical analysis of enzymes. Current duties include administration of curricular design to prepare students for graduate and health professions school by challenging them to become conceptual learners and critical thinkers. She also advises student researchers on their research projects: 1) design, 2) methodology, 3) analyses, 4) writing and 5) presentation.

Dr. Omar Bagasra, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Bagasra is the Director of Claflin University’s South Carolina Center for Biotechnology. His research interests have long been associated with the study of HIV and AIDS. In fact, he has been on the trail of the virus since 1981—the year of the first scientific report. For the past several years, he has focused on trying to gain insight into modes of virus transmission, natural immunities to retro viral infection, as well as the development of gene therapy treatments for HIV-1. Recently, he has concentrated on the molecular pathogenesis of prostate and breast cancers and in the development of edible vaccines for HCV and malaria with funding from the Department of Defense and the South Carolina Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network . His unswerving dedication to his work has resulted in over 200 scientific articles, book chapters, and books. He also has national and international collaborations with numerous well-known scientists, and many of these colleagues received training in molecular morphology in his laboratory at Lincoln University. He is the inventor of the in situ PCR technique. He also keeps a hand in clinical work—he is currently board-eligible in anatomic pathology and a diplomat of the American Board of Medical Laboratory Immunology, and the American boards of Forensic Examiners and Forensic Medicine.

Dr. Rebecca Bullard-Dillard, Ph.D.
Dr. Bullard-Dillard is Chair of the Department of Biology and Director for Research Development at Claflin University. Her efforts in building research infrastructure at the University are funded by the NIH. Her research projects investigate the role of plant proteins that are immunohomologs of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus autoantigens in oral tolerance mechanisms. She is working with Dr. Omar Bagasra on his prostate cancer research project. She has a collaborative project with researchers from MUSC and the Savannah River Site to map the Peromyscus genome.

Dr. Jianguo Chen, Ph.D.
Dr. Chen joined the department in August 2003. He comes to Claflin from a position as a Senior Scientist at Applied Biosystems, Inc. He has significant experience with methods development for microsatellite analysis and sequencing. Dr. Chen is the Director of our Genomics and Sequencing laboratory.

Dr. Gemma Geslani, M.S., M.P.H., Ph.D.
Dr. Geslani’s research interests lie in the arena of public health and health disparities. She is currently engaged in a pilot study entitled: “Reducing Risks for Cardiovascular Diseases, Hypertension and Diabetes through Physical Activity” which has been funded as a sub-project on Dr. Bullard-Dillard’s NIH EARDA grant. In addition, she will be working as a co-investigator on the Kellogg Foundation grant to USC School of Public Health’s Minority Health Disparities Grant.

Dr. Randall Harris, Ph.D.
Dr. Harris’ research interests focus on characterizing the role that bacteria play in certain disease processes and discovering new antibiotics. One of his projects deals with identifying and characterizing novel virulence determinants of the respiratory pathogen Moraxella catarrhalis. He is also collaborating with researchers at USC to investigate the increased colon cancer risk associated with particular resident microflora. Lastly, Dr. Harris is working on a project with Dr. Joseph Rugutt in the Dept. of Chemistry examining antimycobacterial properties of African plant extracts.

Dr. Edythe Jones, Ph.D.
Dr. Jones she is currently completing a grant application to NASA through which to fund a new line of inquiry into the effects of weightlessness on the frequency of firefly flash. In addition, to this new area of interest she is a trained electron microscopist.

Mrs. Florence Anoruo, M.A.T., Ph.D. candidate, University of South Carolina.
Mrs. Anoruo is the Director of the Claflin University Greenhouse. She is an environmental scientist with extensive training in botany. She is currently engaged in bioremediation research funded through NOAA and the USDA and is finishing her Ph.D. training in botany (plant molecular biology) with a project which focuses on plant hormones. In addition, she is interested in developing a phytoremediation process for removal of munitions contaminants such as TNT residues, RDX and ammonium perchlorate from soils contaminated by weapons storage or testing.

Ms. Charlease Kelly, M.A.T.
Ms. Kelly serves as the Laboratory Manager and Instructor of Biology. She has graduate level training in Microbiology and an MAT in secondary science education. She specializes in science pedagogy research.

Dr. Kamal Chowdhury, Ph.D.
Dr. Chowdhury has recently joined the Biology department as plant / agricultural biotechnologist to develop and direct a plant biotechnology program at Claflin. Before joining Claflin, he was a Senior Scientist with Arborgen, world’s leading forest biotechnology company. Prior to that he was the Group Leader of tissue culture section of International Paper, world’s largest paper and pulp company. His research contribution in plant biotechnology area includes 38 publications in 18 peer-reviewed journals on 14 crop species in the area of quantitative and molecular genetics, plant tissue culture and genetic engineering. In addition to working on agricultural biotechnology, his future research interest is in the area of plant-made-pharmaceuticals and utilization of transgenic plants for phytoremediation.