Government, Industry, Non-Profit, Academic Partners

Partnerships are the heart of our Wellstone MDCRC. Collaborators and expert consultants supporting the cores and projects are experts in their respective scientific, clinical and service areas.

Patient Advocacy Partners 

Daniel Paul Perez, A.B., Co-founder of the FSHD Society, Randolph, Massachusetts. As an FSHD patient advocate, Mr. Perez has a leadership role in the Center and in Core A, specifically to implement communications strategies, organize the Patient-Researcher Meeting and International Workshops, and work with patients and families to provide education and support for their participation in the Core C biopsy program. The FSHD Society and the Center cost share to organize these meetings. 

Jamshid Arjomand, Ph.D., Chief Science Officer at the FSHD Society with over 15 years of pharmaceutical and biotechnology experience in chronic pain, neurodegeneration, neuromuscular disorders and human stem cell disease modeling.

Angela Lek, Ph.D., Vice President for Research for the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA); formerly Associate Research Scientist at Yale University, with expertise in using patient cells for gene editing and drug screening.

Center Collaborators

Michael A. Brehm, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Program in Molecular Medicine at UMass Chan,   specializing in immunity – here applied to xenograft modeling of the innate immune response to FSHD disease pathology. [UMass Faculty Profile]

Anastasia Khvorova, Ph.D., Professor in the RNA Therapeutics Institute at UMass Chan, specializing in the development of oligonucleotide therapeutics. [UMass Faculty Profile]

Jonathan K. Watts, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the RNA Therapeutics Institute at UMass Chan, specializing in nucleic acids chemical biology. [UMass Faculty Profile]

Scot A. Wolfe, Ph.D., Professor of Molecular, Cell and Cancer Biology at UMass Chan, specializing in CRISPR gene editing and gene correction therapeutics for muscular dystrophies. [UMass Faculty Profile]

Center Consultants and Services

Steven A. Moore, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Pathology, University of Iowa School of Medicine and the Iowa Wellstone. Dr. Moore and the Iowa Diagnostics Lab are responsible for FSHD genotyping blood and muscle samples for patients participating in Center research.