Norman Harris, PhD, has been named Chairman of the Department of Molecular & Cellular Physiology in the School of Graduate Studies at LSU Health Shreveport.
Dr. Harris was a Research Assistant Professor at LSU Health Shreveport from 1995-1998 before joining the faculty at Pennsylvania State University for six years. He returned to Shreveport in 2004 as an Associate Professor of Molecular & Cellular Physiology. He was promoted to a Full Professor in 2009, and then went on to serve as Vice Chair of the department in 2016. Dr. Harris has served as the Interim Department Chair after the retirement of Dr. Neil Granger in November 2017. Dr. Harris completed his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at the Tennessee Technological University and received his graduate degree and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Vanderbilt University before completing his postdoctoral degree in Physiology at LSU Health Shreveport.
For 23 consecutive years (1996-2019), Dr. Harris has been the Principal Investigator of external funding awards. He has received research awards from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, American Heart Association, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America, and LSU Health Shreveport’s Center for Cardiovascular Diseases & Sciences. Dr. Harris is currently the PI of a $1.8 million National Institutes of Health R01 grant, “Loss of the retinal glycocalyx in diabetes,” and serves as a senior mentor with the NIH’s COBRE Center for Redox Biology and Cardiovascular Disease at LSU Health Shreveport.