Anatomy & Physiology: Current Research
Open Access

Juming Zhong

Biography

Dr. Juming Zhong received his DVM from Southwest University for Nationalities in China in 1982 and served as a lecturer equivalent to Assistant Professor in USA at the same university till 1990. He moved to USA to pursue his graduate study at University of Missouri, and received his PhD there in 1995. He was a postdoctoral fellow with Drs. Joseph Hume and Kathleen Keef at University of Nevada School of Medicine and was promoted to a Research Assistant Professor there in 1999. He joined Auburn University with a tenure track position in 2001, and currently serves as a tenured Associate Professor at the Department of Anatomy, Physiology Pharmacology, College of Veterinary Medicine, Auburn University. His main teaching responsibility is the Course Coordinator of microanatomy for professional program. He also participates in the graduate teaching for biomedical sciences.

Research Interest

Dr. Zhong’s research interests include cardiac and vascular smooth muscle electrophysiology and pharmacology. One of the primary goals of his research is to investigate the signaling pathways underlying ion channel regulation in both cardiac and vascular smooth muscle cells under normal and pathophysiological conditions. Ion channels play a central role in the excitation-contraction coupling of these cells, and thus directly control cardiac function and vascular tone. Abnormal activity of these channels directly contributes to the heart diseases and abnormal blood pressure. Application of patch clamp technique allows us to study these channels in the freshly isolated cardiac and vascular smooth muscle cells. Another primary focus of his laboratory is to investigate the cellular mechanisms underlying myocardial dysfunction resulted from various patho-physiological conditions. Specifically, they try to understand the mechanisms that influence intracellular calcium homeostasis and cell contraction of cardiac myocytes taken from different animal disease models.