Mark Milanick, PhD

Mark Milanick, PhD, current research focuses on developing ways to measure physiological and clinical parameters that can be done at home-either by patients or for students doing online labs. Recent NIH-funded research supports developing erythrosensors, where infrared fluorescent dyes are incorporated inside red blood cells and can then be returned to the donor. Our team notes any changes in the dye that occur in response to blood glucose, pH, and other parameters, which are measured similarly to how pulse-oximeters measure blood oxygen saturation. A previous NIH R01 grant studied the kinetics of membrane transport as a way to understand the mechanism. For example, extracellular protons activate sulfate influx on the anion exchanger in red blood cells. At a neutral pH, sulfate flux is more than 1,000 times slower than chloride flux but at low pH sulfate flux is nearly as fast as chloride transport. The extracellular sodium pump transport site has a substantially higher affinity for potassium than sodium at neutral pH, but at alkaline pH, the site is essentially non-selective. Extracellular protons are transported by the plasma membrane calcium pump with a 1 Ca/2 H stoichiometry.  In the absence of extracellular divalent cations, the pK for proton activation is about 9 but under physiological conditions, the pK is approximately 7.4.

Milanick has developed multiple education courses, including Toxins, the Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, Bodily Fluids and Their Function, Filtering Fact From Fiction with TV crime and Medical Shows, and Science of Sex, Drugs, and Rock'n'Roll. As an outgrowth of his teaching courses and labs, Milanick has published practitioner articles that help students master membrane potential, solve clinical cases and more in journals such as Advances in Physiology Education, Journal of Chemical Education, and The Physics Teacher. Milanick also served as the PI for a NIH Interdisciplinary Training Grant (T90/R90), From Bench to Bedside and Back: Training Clinical Biodetectives. The training grant required each student to have three mentors: a clinical mentor to advise on the translation of the project, an invention mentor to advise on developing a new chemical, instrument, and more, and a life science mentor to advise on testing the device or invention in a living system.

He has also worked on cortisol-both on methods of measurement as well as analysis with colleagues in the wildlife department and with breast cancer survivors.