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Robert Larson works in the lab with PhD advisor Qing-Hui Chen.
With a brand new PhD in Biological Sciences from Michigan Tech, Robert Larson is heading for Iowa to do what he loves best: cardiovascular research. And the Portage Health Foundation, through its health sciences partnership with Tech, is helping him do it.
Larson is one of the first recipient of a PHF Graduate Assistantship that enabled him to focus on finishing the requirements for his doctorate. That helped him win the competitive Lundbeck Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the American Autonomic Society to do research with Mark Chapleau, a professor of internal medicine, molecular physiology and biophysics at the University of Iowa. Chapleau heads one of the world’s premier cardiovascular research centers.
Larson will study hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an inherited condition in which the heart muscle thickens and the heart enlarges, making it hard for the heart to pump blood and potentially leading to heart failure. Current treatments for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy focus on the symptoms—shortness of breath, chest pain and arrhythmias. Larson is looking for new treatment strategies that target the cause and development of the disease.
Winning awards for his research is nothing new for Rob Larson. In 2014, he received national recognition from the American Physiological Society as winner of the Central Nervous System Van Harreveld Memorial Award.
Larson says he found his passion for research “by the back door.” A Chassell native with a BS in Clinical Laboratory Science from Northern Michigan University and a BS in Business Administration from Tech, he was working in a local hospital when Jason Carter was looking for someone who knew how to draw blood. Karyn Fay, director of Tech’s Medical Laboratory Science Program, introduced the chair of Kinesiology and Integrative Physiology to Larson.
“I had no idea what he did, but it sounded interesting,” Larson recalls.
So he came to work on his MS in Biological Sciences, with Carter as his research advisor. They studied the influence of sleep deprivation on neural control of the cardiovascular system—“the interactions between brain and heart,” Larson calls it.
Robert Larson using a vibrating blade microtome to cut brain slices to examine membrane properties and excitability of neurons.
Then Larson moved on to do his PhD with Qing-Hui Chen, an associate professor of kinesiology and integrative physiology. With Chen, he explored the basic mechanisms of neural control of the cardiovascular system by examining how a high-salt diet changes the properties of the membranes encasing the nerves that control blood pressure.
“We found that a high-salt diet increases the excitability of the neurons,” Larson reports. And when the neurons are more excited, that leads to increased sympathetic nerve activity and arterial blood pressure.
They also looked at underlying mechanisms of that finding, and found that dysfunction of calcium-activated potassium channels causes the increased excitability of the neurons in the brain, which is a new finding.
“The goal of our lab is to figure out what changes in the brain contribute to salt-sensitive hypertension (high blood pressure) and to find new treatments for it,” he explains.
His postdoc advisor at the University of Iowa, Chapleau expects nothing less.

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