Rasmussen Lab Staff

Sara K. Rasmussen, MD, PhD
Principal Investigator
Sara.Rasmussen@NationwideChildrens.org

Sara Rasmussen, MD, PhD, earned her medical and doctoral degrees from West Virginia University School of Medicine. She is a pediatric and transplant-certified surgeon with a doctorate in Retrovirology. Her early doctoral studies focused on the mechanisms of reverse transcription and retroviral assembly, as well as resulting in the production of a highly efficient gene therapy vector (2). Her research work in human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) have elucidated so far that certain melanoma cell lines contain a function rec protein, which interacts with HERV-K RcRE (rec Responsive Element) and exports retroviral transcripts out of the nucleus into the cytoplasm of the infected cells (unpublished data). This represents a landmark for the identification of a functional role of endogenous retroviral elements, which potentially are involved in the genesis of human cancers. In 2022, she joined the Department of Abdominal Transplant at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Her past discovery directly led to other publications about the HERVs expression in hepatoblastoma (3-4) and current interest in their genomic characterization and clinical implications in pediatric tumors and ischemia-reperfusion injury in liver transplant.

View Dr. Rasmussen's Publications

Silvia Carrau (Batezati), MD, PhD, is originally from Brazil, where she consecutively earned her medical degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Parana (PUC-PR), board-certification in Ear Nose & Throat by the Brazilian Society of Otolaryngology and Head & Neck Surgery, and doctoral degree in Neuroscience from the University of Sao Paulo (USP-SP).  During her doctoral studies, she confronted an interdisciplinary field, in which she cooperated with the Departments of Otolaryngology and Radiology to investigate, with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the emotional processing of sounds in patients suffering from tinnitus. Since her doctorate studies, she completed several post-doctorate activities in renowned research facilities in the USA, to name the University of Pittsburgh, the former House Ear Institute and the Keck USC School of Medicine in Los Angeles. She also holds a master's degree in Human Nutrition from The Ohio State University, in which she studied the application of nanoparticles with glycemic properties in the improvement of early motor dysfunction in the APP animal model of Alzheimer’s disease. The late graduate study has introduced her to a deeper understanding of Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics. Both surgical and research backgrounds well-positioned her to work on her current first year of post-graduate studies in the Rasmussen Lab at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital.