CSUB's School of Natural Science and Mathematics presents its inaugural public seminar.
Chaitan Khosla, chairman of the chemistry department and professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University, is the guest lecturer. He will explore the auto immune disease celiac sprue in his discussion entitled "Celiac Sprue: Fundatmental and Translational Investigations into an Orphan Disease."
Celiac sprue is an autoimmune disease of the smallintestine that is triggered by gluten, a nutritionally important portein source in the human diet. People who suffer from celiac disease cannot fully digest food grains such as wheat, rye and barley.
Celiac disease is a gastrointestinal disase afflicting roughly 1 in 100 individuals in the US. Currently, ther is no therapeutic option available to treat celiac sprue patients other than a strict and lifelong adherenece to avoiding gluten.
Khosla and his team are dedicated to researching this serious, but often overlooked disease. Their molecular approaches have uncovered new insights into the disease that are leading to new treatment approaches.
The seminar is being funded through a $400,000 National Science Foundation grant awarded to CSUB. The grant provides scholarships for CSUB science, math, and engineering majors and allows CSUB's School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics to offer a lecture series of interest to science students, faculty, and the general public. NSF is an independent federal agency created to promote the progress of science. The agency funds specific research proposals that have been judged the most promising by a rigorous and objective merit-review system.
