William H. Guilford, Ph.D.

About

Current work

I currently serve as Associate Dean of Undergraduate Affairs in the School of Engineering.  In this role I seek to advance the use of high-impact practices, to advance curricula suitable for the 21st century, to inspire students to engage outside of the classroom, and to support students in all ways to achieve their goals. I am proud in this role to have founded the First Year Education Center in the School of Engineering, and to have led a modernization of our core curricula. 

I am fascinated by human learning and I am committed to using knowledge from scholarship of teaching and learning to improve instruction. My most recent work has been to study career self-concept among biomedical engineering students, and to learn when and why it changes between career aspirations for engineering versus career aspirations for medicine. 

I also enjoy working with students and physicians to design novel clinical devices and to use engineering to help solve fundamental clinical problems. This includes working with physicians in Infectious Disease to design means for understanding and preventing the spread of pathogens within patient populations. 

Previous work

My bench research has largely drawn to a close, but I am proud of the work of my graduate and undergraduate student colleagues. My laboratory studied the molecular mechanisms by which cells move at the level of individual molecules using a laser trap - a tool that can capture small translucent particles and hold them in three-dimensional space (see image). We  used the laser trap to study the mechanisms of gliding by the intracellular pathogen Toxoplasma gondii. Prior to that, my lab was the first to measure the biomechanics and coordination of molecular motors inside a living cell - the flagellated alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Also among our achievements were revealing that the molecular motor myosin is directly regulated by the gaseous signaling molecule nitric oxide, demonstrating that myosin forms "catch bonds" with actin - getting stronger the harder you pull - and showing the fundamental limits and biases of single particle tracking algorithms. 

Education

University of Saint Francis

University of Arizona

University of Vermont