Dr. Fuhui Tong is the Associate Provost and Dean of the Graduate and Professional School. Her responsibilities include providing strategic, scholarly and financial leadership of the school, bolstering the university’s identity as a research institution in a manner analogous to our peers, and supporting the enhancement of all graduate and professional programs to build and sustain excellence. Dr. Tong joined Texas A&M in 2007 and is a Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology.
Before serving as Interim Associate Provost and Dean from 2022-24, Dr. Tong served as Department Head and Doug Palmer Endowed Chair of Educational Psychology. Working collaboratively with her team, Dr. Tong has led the department to elevated academic excellence and recruited talented faculty and staff, along with $22 million in new funding to support research and graduate education. During her tenure, graduate applications and enrollment of underrepresented minority graduate/professional students saw considerable gains. Dr. Tong has also co-directed an $80 million system-approved research center where a diverse group of graduate students acquired research and publication experiences. Students advised by Dr. Tong have become local and global leaders in PK-16 settings.
Dr. Tong earned her bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in applied linguistics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. She earned her Ph.D. in educational psychology from Texas A&M University in 2006.

Barbara Gastel, a physician specializing in biomedical writing and editing, is professor of integrative biosciences, humanities in medicine, and biotechnology at Texas A&M University, where she coordinates the master's degree program in science and technology journalism.
Gastel earned a BA from Yale and an MD and MPH from Johns Hopkins. After medical school, she did an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) mass media fellowship at Newsweek. She then worked in communication and administration at the National Institutes of Health. She also has taught science writing at MIT. Before joining the Texas A&M faculty in 1989, she was assistant dean for teaching at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.
Gastel is author, with Robert A. Day, of the most recent editions of the book How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper. She also is the author of the books Presenting Science to the Public, Teaching Science: A Guide for College and Professional School Instructors, and Health Writer's Handbook. In addition, she has written many articles and chapters on writing, editing, teaching, and medical topics. For a decade she edited Science Editor, the periodical of the Council of Science Editors.
Since early in her career, Gastel has worked to promote international communication of science. She was visiting professor of technical communication from 1983 to 1985 at what is now Peking University Health Science Center, and she later led the US aspect of a program to teach English-language biomedical writing and editing in Asia. She also has played lead roles in AuthorAID, an international program to help researchers in developing countries write about and publish their work.
Gastel has received awards from the American Medical Writers Association and the Council of Science Editors, and she is a fellow of AAAS. She also has received the John P. McGovern Science and Society Award, given by the scientific research society Sigma Xi. In 2012 she received the Texas A&M University Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award in Extension, Outreach, Continuing Education, or Professional Development, and in 2015 she received the Texas A&M University Bush Excellence Award for Faculty in Public Service.

Perla is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American institute of Chemical Engineers, and a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society. Perla is an associate editor for the Journal of the Electrochemical Society and on editorial board for the Journal of Physical Chemistry of the American Chemical Society.
She received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, under the supervision of Professor Keith Johnston, in close collaboration with Professor Peter Rossky, using molecular simulations to develop a better understanding of chemical reactions in supercritical water.
Perla has more than 350 peer-reviewed publications with over 23,000 citations according to Google Scholar and has received numerous prestigious awards including the National Science Foundation POWRE Award, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Texas Engineering Experiment Station Research Impact Award and the Engineering Genesis Award, and The Association of Former Students of Texas A&M University Distinguished Achievements Award in Research.
Her research interests center on the underlying mechanisms driving surface and interfacial chemical and electrochemical processes. She uses and develops first-principles computational materials design, and her findings are integrated with experimental measurements from multiple laboratory collaborations in the U.S. and abroad.

Ivett A. Leyva became the head of the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University in September 2021. Previously, she worked at the Air Force for 15 years. She was the program officer for Hypersonic Aerodynamics at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, AFRL and prior to that she was a researcher at the AFRL Rocket Lab working on liquid rocket instabilities.
Her technical expertise is in hypersonic aerodynamics and liquid rocket engines. While at the Air Force Ivett also worked on the protection of basic and applied research. Ivett holds a bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree from Caltech. Her Ph.D. was in Aeronautics.
Ivett has six patents and has authored numerous papers and two book chapters. She is a fellow of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Air Force Research Laboratory, a National Associate of the National Research Council of the National Academies, and a recipient of a Civilian Achievement Medal and two meritorious Civilian Service Awards and Medals from the Air Force. Ivett has co-authored six NRC reports and was a member of the ASEB for 6 years.

Natalie Johnson is an assistant professor at the Texas A&M School of Public Health. Her research interests include air pollution exposure, particularly effects on infants and children following prenatal exposure, including susceptibility to respiratory infections and asthma. She is interested in nutritional interventions to reduce oxidative stress associated with maternal exposures to protect against these common childhood diseases. Dr. Johnson is the vice chair of the interdisciplinary program in Toxicology.
Dr. Johnson was selected as a Texas A&M University Presidential Impact Fellow for 2021 for her commitment to advancing knowledge through transformational learning, discovery and innovation.
Dr. Johnson was the 2020 recipient of the New Career Scientist award presented by the Reproductive and Developmental Toxicology specialty section of the Society of Toxicology.
Dr. Johnson received her Bachelor of Science in biology and Doctor of Philosophy in toxicology from Texas A&M University. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in environmental health sciences.

Dr. Sarkar received her Ph.D. from Purdue University on Biological Engineering, where she worked on “biophysical and biomolecular approaches to assess cell signaling and cross talk in breast cancer cells”. She did her first post-doctoral research at National Cancer Institute (NCI/NIH), focusing on the tumor suppressor role of C/EBPδ. During her second post-doctoral research at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center with Dr. Sendurai Mani, she has focused on identification and characterization of a breast cancer stem cell marker (GD2). Dr. Sarkar gained extensive experience working with cancer cell lines as well as in vivo xenograft models. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Biology and a co-director of the Center for Statistical Bioinformatics. Her lab is focusing on the role of tumor microenvironment in mammary tumor progression and drug response. She is trained in an interdisciplinary field bringing together the knowledge of Cancer Biology, Bioinformatics, Metabolomics, Molecular Biology, and Nanotechnology.

My laboratory is broadly interested in understanding the structural basis of signal transduction events that occur at the membrane surface. These events are mediated by signaling proteins that reversibly associate with membranes in response to binding second messengers, such as Ca2+ ions, diacylglycerol, and phosphoinositides. One of the key kinases regulating these signal transduction pathways is the Protein Kinase C (PKC) family. Aberrant levels of PKC expression or activity have been implicated in a large number of human diseases, such as cancer, cardiac failure, Alzheimer's disease, and diabetes. Despite the significance of PKC in signal transduction and human health, the structural and dynamical basis of its