Shlomit Radom-Aizik, PhD
Professor, Department of Pediatrics
Executive Director, Research Center for Exercise Medicine and Sleep (RCEMS), Exercise Medicine Division Chief. School of Medicine, University of California Irvine.
Primary research focus: Functional genomics and exercise physiology, including: immune system and muscle genomic and epigenetic responses to exercise; effects of exercise and training during childhood and adolescence; the effects of exercise and training on children with chronic disease and those with special needs.
As a molecular biologist and exercise physiologist, Shlomit Radom-Aizik, PhD, seeks to open new avenues of research in the molecular transducers of physical activity, focusing on the genomic and epigenetic response of circulating leukocytes to exercise. In her role as executive director of RCEMS/PERC, she oversees a team of research associates, exercise technicians, trainers and molecular laboratory technicians who have successfully studied and trained hundreds of healthy children and adolescents in prescriptive exercise, as well as children with conditions including obesity, asthma, leukemia, congenital heart disease and spina bifida.
“By uncovering the molecular mechanisms that drive the health benefits of exercise, we can more precisely prescribe exercise for all children—improving health outcomes and expanding the potential of both body and mind.”
Ariel Neikrug, PhD
Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior. Director of RCEMS Sleep Health Program, University of California, Irvine School of Medicine.
Primary research focus: His current research focuses on the study of behavioral activity rhythms and their relevance to disease risk and overall health. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Neikrug’s research examines the relationships among sleep, aerobic fitness, and cardiovascular disease risk in children and adolescents.
Dr. Neikrug serves as the Director of the Health Psychology and Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at UCI and leads the Sleep Program at the Pediatric Research Center for Exercise Medicine. He earned his PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of California, San Diego and the San Diego State University joint program. He then completed a clinical fellowship at Rush University Medical Center, followed by clinical and research postdoctoral fellowships at the Salt Lake City VA Medical Center and the University of Utah.
“Exploring how sleep and exercise work together to affect our health helps us create lifestyle plans that can greatly enhance our quality of life and lower the risk of disease.”
Dan M. Cooper, MD
Distinguished Professor Pediatrics, Interim Executive Director UCI Institute for Precision Health, Associate Director Institute for Clinical and Translational Science,
Pediatric Exercise Research Center Clinical Informatics and Analytics Unit Director.
Primary research focus: How exercise can best be used to prevent asthma and obesity in children, with particular interest in new therapies involving both pharmacologic and lifestyle interventions.
Dan M. Cooper, MD, is recognized for his transformative efforts to uncover the molecular mechanisms of exercise that affect children’s health. Cooper, who is board certified in pediatrics and pediatric pulmonology, has conducted NIH-funded research for more than 30 years. This unique combination of clinical expertise and robust research experience places Cooper in an ideal position to guide and mentor young investigators. His projects are designed to develop platforms to translate research discoveries that will ultimately benefit children’s health.
“The right kind of exercise at the right time in childhood can promote health across the life span.”
Fadia Haddad, PhD
Manager and Scientific Advisor RCEMS Molecular Laboratory
Primary research focus: Functional testing of leukocytes, RNA and DNA analyses, as well as epigenetic modifications in response to chronic and acute exercise.
As PERC’s laboratory manager, Fadia Haddad, PhD, supervises all molecular assays for the center’s research. She has more than 30 years of experience developing and performing molecular assays to study gene function, transcriptional regulation and the effect of exercise/activity/inactivity, growth and the endocrine system on genomic and epigenetic molecular mechanisms in the tissue/cells. Haddad’s main mission at PERC is to adopt new laboratory technologies to advance exercise-as-medicine for children’s health. Using cutting-edge technologies and tools, she ensures that sample collection and processing protocols are performed according to highest standard procedures.
“New technologies have revolutionized our ability to understand exercise at the molecular levels. Today we can use sophisticated techniques that are completely feasible in children, to probe how individual cells respond, grow and develop in response to physical activity.”
Candice Taylor, MD,MPH, FAAP
Associate Clinical Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Co-Director, Program in Medical Education, Leadership Education to Advance Diversity – African, Black and Caribbean (PRIME LEAD-ABC), Associate Program Director, UCI-CHOC Pediatric Residency Program
Primary research focus: Early-life physical activity and maternal child health and well-being, with special consideration for health inequities in minoritized and marginalized communities.
As an academic general pediatrician and physician-researcher, Candice Taylor Lucas, MD, MPH studies the effects of exercise and advocates for children to engage in active play and other physical activity as early as infancy. PERC research findings often make their way into her patient care. And it’s not uncommon for a wellness check or follow-up visit for health behaviors to include a patient receiving a prescription for exercise. Taylor Lucas shares her knowledge and experience in classroom, clinical, and community settings, promoting health behaviors that support healthy growth, development and well-being for children, and adolescents.
“Physical activity matters to healthy growth. It takes a village—children, families, neighborhoods, healthcare providers, daycare programs, schools, community-based organizations, health systems and more—to enable children to achieve their daily dose of active play.”
Annamarie Stehli, MPH
RECMS Principal Biostatician MoTrPAC RCEMS Database Management
Annamarie Stehli, MPH, earned a master’s degree in public health at UC Berkeley, assumed the role of a statistician in the Department of Pediatrics in 2002. She has since contributed to a wide range of projects related to children and families affected by developmental disorders. These included three National Institutes of Health-funded multi-site longitudinal studies, the CHOC-UC Irvine Neurodevelopmental Programs (A First 5 Initiative of the California Children and Families Commission), and interdisciplinary research with programs and investigators in genetics, neuroimaging, clinical trials, education and public health.
In 2015, she joined RCEMS, where she provides analytic support for study design and grant development, outcomes reporting, and manuscript preparation.
Anjan Batra, MD
Pediatric Cardiologist ECG Review
Primary research focus: prevention of sudden cardiac arrest in children and adolescents.
Anjan Batra is a pediatric cardiologist who specializes in electrophysiology, arrhythmia management and device implantation. His research and scientific findings are reflected in more than 60 publications in prestigious national journals and text books. He is an internationally recognized lecturer.
Abel Adrián Plaza Florido, PhD
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Primary research focus: Pediatric exercise immunomics
Dr. Adrián’s overall goal in his research career is to understand the molecular and physiological mechanisms underlying the health benefits of exercise in children and adolescents with various clinical conditions, such as obesity, anemia, asthma, and cancer. He’s interested in the interplay of exercise immunology, physiology, and multi-omics approaches (genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, metabolomics, and proteomics) to identify the mechanisms through which exercise promotes health in the pediatric population.
“quote soon to come”
Frank Zaldivar, PhD (†)
PERC Flow Cytometry Program Leader
Director, PERC Community Education and Outreach
Primary research focus: Exercise immunology and community outreach.
Frank Zaldivar, PhD, is an immunologist who leads the PERC flow cytometry program. He also directs the Biospecimen Handling and Storage Unit at the UC Irvine Institute for Clinical and Translational Science. With a background in immunology and hematology, he has used flow cytometry for 17 years to evaluate how exercise in growing children affects circulating immune cells. Flow cytometry is the cornerstone of any immunology laboratory exercise, including at PERC.
Zaldivar has published extensively with PERC team on growth and exercise in children. His vision is to use flow cytometry to explore children’s immune systems and to determine how exercise can improve health and prevent adult diseases, like atherosclerosis and cancer.
“Just a short time ago, few would have believed that we could identify markers on individual white blood cells that indicate where a cell has been, where it’s going and how it might respond to stress. Today, breathtaking advances in flow cytometry make this all possible.”
(†) deceased
Ronen Bar-Yoseph, MD
Visiting Researcher
Primary research focus: Gas exchange kinetics across the life span; development and standardization of exercise protocols; use of pediatric exercise as medicine.
Ronen Bar-Yoseph seeks to better understand the kinetics of oxygen consumption in healthy children and in children with different clinical conditions. His research project begins the process of systematically identifying the best protocols to use for children and young adults. Through oxygen consumption analysis, he strives to better understand how children’s bodies cope with physiological challenges that arise. This research could lead to improved and more accurate fitness assessment both in health and disease. Bar-Yoseph is also a consultant for the UC Irvine Cardiopulmonary Center Clinical Exercise Laboratory.
“The key to understanding why healthy children or children with chronic diseases are limited in their physical activity lies in advanced mathematical modeling of how children use oxygen while exercising.”
Nitsan Dror, MD
Visiting Researcher
Primary research focus: How exercise affects the growing child. Childhood is a unique time where hormonal changes are responsible for our future. My interest is in how exercise effects those hormonal changes especially growth hormones and bone metabolism during childhood and puberty.
Nitsan Dror, MD, is pediatric endocrinologist from Meir Medical Center, Israel. He conducted studies assessing growth hormones secretion in different types of exercise in children and the effect of growth hormone treatment on the ability to exercise in children with growth hormone deficiency. Currently his focus is the molecular changes in different types of exercise on bone metabolism.
“As long as one exercises, does not eat to the point of satiation, he will not suffer sickness and he will grow in strength, even if he eats harmful foods. Whoever is sedentary and does not exercise, even if he eats the proper foods and takes care to follow the rules of medicine, will be full of pain for all his days and his strength will fade away”. –Rambam 12th century
PERC/RCEMS Study Coordinators
Ellie Civello
Clinical Study Coordinator
Scott Graph, MS
REACH Project Manager and RCEMS Study Coordinator
Peter Horvath, PhD
IRB Administrator Contact & Molecular Laboratory
Cherryl Nugas
Recruitment and Coordination
Rula Ballat
Clinical Study Coordinator & Exercise Physiologist
Rebecca Huynh
Clinical Study Coordinator
Pearl Law
Clinical Research Coordinator
Julia Kim
Clinical Research Coordinator
Greyson Hanson
Personal Trainer (MoTrPAC) and Clinical Study Coordinator (MoTrPAC iSLEEP)
Scott Bowman
School’s Liaison and Recruitment
Dylan Barry
Junior Specialist iSLEEP
RCEMS Laboratories
Hoang Pham, MS
Senior Exercise Physiologist
Scott Graph
Senior Exercise Physiologist and DXA Technician
Ellie Civello
Clinical Study Coordinator and Exercise Physiologist
Fadia Haddad, PhD
Molecular Biology Lab Manager
Cherryl Nugas
Staff Research Associate Molecular Laboratory
DXA Technician
RCEMS Nurse
Anna Ngo-De Jesus, RN
CCR Staff Supporting RCEMS Research
Lauren Gonzalez RN
CCR Clinical Nurse
Diana Moyer, RN
CCR Clinical Nurse
PRCEMS/PERC Ongoing and Past Trainees
Irie Paul Padua, MD
2023-2024
Primary Care UCI Sports Medicine Fellow
Exploring the impact of chest binders on exercise performance and breathing patterns during exercise. (Concept originated and mentorship support provided for Bio 199 student Laura SanGiacomo.)
Nghi Tran, MD
2024-2025
UCI Sports Medicine Fellow
Chest Binders Project
Kari Schoettler, MS2
2024-2025
Chest Binders Project
Joseph Carbone, MS3
Medical Student Researcher
Abraham Chiu
Pharmacology Graduate Student
Yunho Huh
Project Manager of iXercise, PhD Candidate Networked Systems, Information and Computer Sciences
Alexandra Lim, MS2
Medical Student Researche
Sebastian Piombo, MD, PhD
Medical Scientist Training Program
Abel Adrián Plaza Florido
Ph.D. candidate in biomedicine, University of Granada (Spain), PERC Visiting Graduate Student, June-August 2019
School of Medicine Exercise is Medicine Elective Course Coordinators
Matt Mekany, MS2
2017-2018
EME Founder
Joseph Chen, MS2
2017-2018
EME Founder
Joseph Carbone, MS2
2018-2019
Alexa Lucas, MS2
2018-2019
Alexandra Lim, MS2
2019-2020
Katherine Bogaard, MS2
2020-2021
Past Faculty Members
Frank Zaldivar, PhD (†)
PERC Flow Cytometry Program Leader
Director, PERC Community Education and Outreach
Primary research focus: Exercise immunology and community outreach.
Frank Zaldivar, PhD, is an immunologist who leads the PERC flow cytometry program. He also directs the Biospecimen Handling and Storage Unit at the UC Irvine Institute for Clinical and Translational Science. With a background in immunology and hematology, he has used flow cytometry for 17 years to evaluate how exercise in growing children affects circulating immune cells. Flow cytometry is the cornerstone of any immunology laboratory exercise, including at PERC.
Zaldivar has published extensively with PERC team on growth and exercise in children. His vision is to use flow cytometry to explore children’s immune systems and to determine how exercise can improve health and prevent adult diseases, like atherosclerosis and cancer.
“Just a short time ago, few would have believed that we could identify markers on individual white blood cells that indicate where a cell has been, where it’s going and how it might respond to stress. Today, breathtaking advances in flow cytometry make this all possible.”
Dwight Nance, PhD (†)
Professor
Primary research focus: Long-term immunological and behavioral effects of metabolic and physical challenges faced early in life, and the further development of animal models of asthma, obesity and metabolic syndrome.
Diet and exercise have a powerful impact on the development of humans, and may provide novel therapies for the treatment of chronic diseases in children. As a neuroimmunologist, Dwight Nance, PhD, is interested in the interactions between the brain and immune system. His current research is helping to develop experimental models of childhood diseases to further test the role of these experimental interventions.
(†) deceased
Jen Jen Chen, MD
Assistant Clinical Professor
Primary research focus: Tele-exercise, remote monitoring and cystic fibrosis.
Through a telemedicine platform at PERC, Jen Jen Chen, MD, streams live exercises to children with cystic fibrosis (CF), a population that is less inclined to be active and exercise regularly. The program motivates these children to exercise, which can result in positive health benefits. It also helps Chen assess the feasibility of this type of program in the everyday life of a CF patient. Her research incorporates biometric monitoring with accelerometers and heart-rate monitors, as well as exercise and physical activity assessments, to evaluate patients’ fitness and habitual physical activity levels. Chen soon will complement her clinical and research skills with an advanced degree in data science. Her bioinformatics insights will add an important perspective to PERC’s study of exercise as medicine for children.
“Combining advances in the brave new world of data science with the ability to integrate ‘big data’ into exercise-as-medicine will be the new frontier of physical activity research.”
Kim Lu, MD
Assistant Clinical Professor
Primary research focus: The interaction between fitness, asthma and obesity.
Asthma and obesity are significant diseases that affect many children and their families. Obesity has an impact on the risk for asthma and on health throughout a person’s lifespan. As a pediatric pulmonologist, Kim Lu, MD, seeks to better understand how physical activity and weight affect asthma in children. Her studies explore ways cinicians can use exercise as treatment for children with asthma and obesity.
“In order to understand the relationship of obesity and asthma, both terrible epidemics in today’s children, we must probe the impact of exercise on fundamental genomic function in the immune system.”
Martin Perlsteyn, MD
Past Research Fellow
Martin Perlsteyn, MD, has research experience from the Université De Montréal, St. Justine Hospital’s’ Department of Pediatric Endocrinology and from McGill University Language Development Lab. He joins the PRCEM research team as a study manager for the Fitness for ALL project. This pilot project studied the effect of exercise on the immune system genomic response in children who have survived acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).
“Exercise can lessen the damaging effects of stress. We must gain a better understanding of these processes in children, in whom very little basic research exists linking stress, exercise and overall health.”
Autumn Ivy, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Physiology and Biophysics
Primary research focus: Primary research focus: exercise, neuroepigenetics, and the developing brain.
Exercise is known to be a powerful, positive modulator of cognitive function in humans. In rodent models, mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of exercise on cognition include the formation of new connections between neurons, increased numbers of newborn neurons, and expression of factors directly implicated in the strength and survival of these neurons. But, what is the impact of exercise on the developing brain? And, what type and ‘dose’ of exercise leads to benefits in cognitive functions? The Ivy Lab tests the overarching hypothesis that physical activity during early childhood leads to long-lasting changes in the way the brain develops and functions. The lab focuses on identifying specific epigenetic mechanisms activated within neurons early in life, as those neurons are first establishing their connections. Dr. Ivy believes that understanding neurobiological mechanisms of early-life exercise underlying brain function can lead to specific, targeted treatment and exercise recommendations for various patient populations within pediatrics and pediatric neurology.
“All children deserve the opportunity for optimal brain development and function throughout their lifespan. As we identify childhood risk factors for later-life cognitive problems (such as stress, trauma, or genetic disorders), we must also identify tangible, early-life interventions to offset these negative consequences.”
Greg Adams, PhD
Primary research focus: Cellular and molecular mechanisms that mediate the adaptation of tissues.
Greg Adams, PhD, conducts primary research into the cellular and molecular processes that help tissues adapt to changes in functional demands. A major theme of his work has been the modulation of the adaptation of skeletal muscle in the presence of changing signals received via the circulation (e.g., hormones, growth factors and cytokines) and the presence non-muscle cells that contribute to the immediate environment of the muscle cells.
This work is conducted in the context of various states and/or conditions (e.g., exercise, renal failure, spinal cord injury, chronic inflammation) or manifestations thereof (e.g., cytokine levels, chronic inflammation, hypoxia, disuse) that disrupt skeletal muscle homeostasis in both animals and humans.
Kimberley D. Lakes, PhD
Director of the Executive Function and Behavior Assessment Program (2016-2018), Pediatric Exercise and Genomics Research Center