I am currently Dean, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. In my previous appointments as Director, Gene Therapy Program and Chair, Department of Comparative Biomedical Sciences I have undertaken the role of mentoring early-career faculty members, since mentoring is a well-established resource critical to the success of junior faculty researchers. Having had the opportunity to recruit new faculty at the Assistant Professor level, I have previously worked to establish formal mentored career development programs that would support early-career faculty, and to facilitate informal mentoring opportunities for promoting their career advancement. In continuing my education through an Ed.D. program in Higher Education Administration, I completed a dissertation research project entitled “Early-career faculty perceptions of seeking extramural funding for academic biomedical research”, in which mentoring was identified as a major theme. These experiences have allowed me to provide early-career faculty with targeted feedback in support of their research projects, as well as their academic contribution to teaching and service. In my own laboratory research, I am working in translational research of cancer to develop multiple methods for gene and cell therapy, particularly in the use of virus-based and nanoparticle delivery vehicles. I have worked extensively with oncolytic virus vectors for many years, and my laboratory is modifying capsid proteins on virus vectors for cancer retargeting, as well as developing cancer vaccines and conditionally replicating virus vectors for cancer therapy. I have extensive experience in analysis of gene expression using quantitative RT-PCR. In support of translational cancer studies in my laboratory, I have extensive experience immortalizing cell lines from primary tumors and performing co-culture experiments. I have established small animal imaging capability, and I have worked to develop methods for non-invasive monitoring of oncolytic virus and nanoparticle biodistribution in vivo. Among the various methods I have developed are novel modifications of virus capsid proteins to allow SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) imaging in vivo.