Victor Salinas, M.D., Ph.D.

Biography

Dr. Victor Salinas is an Instructor in the Department of Neurology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW) and the Neurology Section at the North Texas VA Medical Center.

Dr. Salinas obtained his MD/PhD degrees at UTSW. His graduate work applied high-throughput mutagenesis and evolutionary genomics to the fundamental question of how a protein's amino acid sequence encodes its function and structure. He completed his residency training in Neurology at UTSW during which he conducted research dissecting the contribution of myeloid cells to inflammation of the central nervous system.

The fundamental goal of his laboratory at UTSW is to disentangle the complexity of molecular and cellular interactions that drive an immune response and how these contribute to autoimmunity of the central nervous system in diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis (MS). He applies methods from synthetic biology, high-throughput single-cell nucleic acid profiling, and massively parallel genetic engineering using pre-clinical animal models and patient-derived samples. These efforts are intricately motivated by his clinical practice where he evaluates and treats patients with MS and other neuroimmunological disorders.