Barnes elevated to Distinguished Professor
UAB Reporter
July 30, 2018
The University of Alabama System Board of Trustees awarded the rank of Distinguished Professor to five faculty during its meeting June 8.
Stephen Barnes, Ph.D., was named Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the School of Medicine. Barnes came to UAB in 1977 as a mathematical gastroenterology fellow through the National Library of Medicine and joined the faculty in 1979 as an assistant professor. Now, in addition to his position in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Barnes is a senior scientist at UAB’s Center for Free Radical Biology, Nutrition Obesity Research Center, Center for Bone and Joint Disease and Nephrology Research and Training Center and he has dual appointments in the departments of Environmental Health Sciences, Genetics and Vision Sciences.
Barnes has published more than 300 peer-reviewed journal articles, reviews and book chapters and has delivered lectures at institutions such as Vanderbilt University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Durham in in Durham, England. In 2012, Barnes was named UAB’s Distinguished Faculty Lecturer. He also is a member of the International Science Advisory Panel at Imperial College London’s National Phenome Center.
UAB School of Engineering and Medicine: Weekly Seminar
1:25 pm – 2:15 pm, Friday, October 27, 2017
Heritage Hall – Room 125
Stephen Barnes, Ph.D.
Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Environmental Health Sciences, and Vision Sciences
Director, Targeted Metabolomics and Proteomics Laboratory
Senior Scientist, UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center
“Metabolomics and engineering – a two-way process”
As for many other areas of science, bioanalysis is built on the principles of physics and its application to physical processes and the engineering needed to make it better/faster/cheaper. Chromatographic separation of biological analytes is no exception – it began over a century ago in the separation of plant pigments, and has moved to concepts of phase partition (and a Nobel Prize in 1952) to GC and LC and is combined with all sorts of detection systems (another Nobel Prize in 2002). By identifying critical steps in metabolism associated with disease identified with metabolomics, geneticists are applying gene therapy as clinical treatments. The same principles can be applied to organisms that can be engineered make either unique compounds with complex chiral chemistry, or large amounts of chemicals suitable as feedstocks. Engineering and science is now catching up with yeasts and the wine industry that figured out how to this before the advent of systematic bioanalytical science.
Teaching metabolomics: a UAB outreach to researchers in sub-Saharan Africa
by Jeff Hansen
May 31, 2016
For the last 10 weeks, Stephen Barnes, Ph.D., University of Alabama at Birmingham, has taught a group of master’s degree students at a university in the land-locked African nation of Mali. His outreach — via two hours of video conferencing each day and a lot of class material preparation — came at the request of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to help NIAID create a cadre of bioinformatics researchers at one of the ground zeros for the deadly infectious disease malaria.
