Dr. Sasha Shafikhani completed his undergraduate and Ph.D. studies at the University of California at Berkeley and postdoctoral studies at the University of California at San Francisco. Dr. Shafikhani is currently a Professor in the Department of Medicine at Rush University Medical Center. He is also the founder and president of Sani Immunomodulon LLC. He has served on the editorial board of twelve journals as an editor and an associate editor. As a cellular microbiologist, his group conducts projects that involve bacterial pathogenesis, wound healing/infection, and cancer biology. Specifically, his laboratory focuses on (i) determining the defective mechanisms that render diabetic wounds vulnerable to infection and impaired healing; (ii) developing immunomodulator-based approaches to reduce infections in diabetic wounds and at surgical sites; (iii) determining the virulence mechanisms that mediate Pseudomonas aeruginosa pathogenesis; (iv) determining the eukaryotic host innate immune responses that specifically recognize and target bacterial pathogens amongst commensal flora; (iv) assessing the role of apoptotic compensatory proliferation signaling microvesicles in wound healing and in cancer; (v) and employing bacterial toxins as molecular tools to dissect important mammalian cellular processes, particularly as they relate to cancer.