By Michelle Jaffee
Jose Abisambra, M.S., Ph.D., and Ramon Sun, Ph.D., have been named to new associate director positions at the McKnight Brain Institute. Abisambra, deputy director of the Brain Injury, Rehabilitation, and Neuroresilience Center, will serve as associate director for research programs, and Sun, director of the Center for Advanced Spatial Biomolecule Research, will serve as associate director for innovation.
Abisambra and Sun join the MBI leadership team of Director Jennifer Bizon, Ph.D. and Deputy Directors Steven DeKosky, M.D., and Gordon Mitchell, Ph.D., in guiding the MBI’s 250-plus member neuroscience research community. In their new roles, Abisambra will focus on community-building, while Sun will focus on expanding access to today’s latest and most advanced technologies.
Abisambra and Sun will help develop strategies and programs to elevate the neurosciences across the University of Florida campus. The newly created positions are a response to MBI community feedback received during last year’s MBI strategic-plan development that ranked intellectual community and core research facilities as the top two priorities for growth, Bizon said.
“Joe is a community builder and well-known among our neuroscience community. He will be a good steward of new programs to bolster our intellectual climate,” she said. “Ramon has the depth of knowledge on the latest technologies, including spatial metabolomics, which is a new and exciting technology to apply to brain research. He will help us build out multiple research cores for MBI faculty that will be very helpful to our community.”
Born in Miami and raised in Colombia, Abisambra earned his doctorate in medical sciences/molecular medicine in 2010 at the University of South Florida and went on to complete a postdoc there. He started his first lab at the University of Kentucky and in 2018 came to UF, where he now serves as an associate professor of neuroscience and vice chair of strategy for the Department of Neuroscience. In the lab, Abisambra studies the molecular mechanisms linking tau with neurodegeneration.
“The MBI is a pillar that has helped me develop my lab and expand its work and its reach,” Abisambra said. “Now I get to be a part of elevating others. My role will be to connect labs in our vast landscape of rich neuroscience at UF and develop initiatives to help our labs grow.”
Sun, who was born in China and raised in New Zealand, completed his doctorate in biochemistry and cancer biology at the Australian National University in 2010, followed by a postdoc at Stanford in cancer metabolism and a second postdoc in mass spectrometry at the University of Kentucky. Like Abisambra, Sun started his first lab at Kentucky, then joined UF in 2022 as an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology. His research focuses on understanding molecular events connecting complex carbohydrates to cellular metabolism, signaling, and physiology, with a particular aim of understanding the etiology of neurological diseases.
Among aspects of his new role, Sun will facilitate usage of UF’s HiPerGator supercomputer among MBI researchers.
“I will be working to get more core facilities up and running to an efficient level that can benefit the broader research community,” Sun said. “The goal is to develop a more coherent operation of everything under the MBI umbrella and make it more accessible and easier for MBI investigators.”