Marco Brotto, Ph.D., was co-founder and director of MUBIG from 2007-15 and served as the Dale and Dorothy Thompson Missouri Endowed Professor of Nursing and Health Studies with adjunct appointments in Medicine and Pharmacology at UMKC. He is currently the George W. and Hazel M. Jay Professor and director of the Ph.D. nursing program at the College of Nursing and Health Innovation at the University of Texas at Arlington. Brotto’s expertise centers on aging and sarcopenia, bone/muscle crosstalk, excitation contraction coupling and intracellular calcium handling in skeletal muscle. Brotto collaborates closely with the MUBIG members at UMKC as well as the Bone Biology Group at the UMKC School of Dentistry through multiple projects, including the NIH-funded program project grant on “Osteocyte regulation of bone/muscle with age”.

Jon Andresen, Ph.D., was an Assistant Professor of Physiology at the UMKC School of Medicine from 2007-12 and co-founded MUBIG. He taught physiology in the Anesthesiology Assistants program and researched tandem pore domain potassium channels as well as phosphoinositide signaling in cerebrovascular smooth muscle. He received his MBA in Strategy and Innovation from the University of Iowa in 2013. He co-founded Alamo Eye Care and The Contact Lens Institute of San Antonio in 2014 and served as president of ESI Consulting as an education and corporate strategy consultant. In 2015 he co-founded EchoLase Inc., a medical device company with expertise in optoacoustics. Andresen continues to collaborate with MUBIG members on bone-muscle crosstalk as well as other projects.