The following was submitted for the CASE Dean’s June Newsletter.

Dr. Joshua Stafford received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. After a brief stint as a post-doctoral fellow and junior research faculty in the department of pharmacology and physiology at Saint Louis University, he joined Missouri S&T in 2025 as an assistant research professor in biological sciences alongside Drs Gina Yosten and Grant Kolar as part of the Yosten Research Group.

Being the child of a Type 1 diabetic has informed his research interests throughout his career. His thesis work centered around environmental factors, specifically early childhood enteroviral infection, as a precipitating event for the development of Type 1 diabetes. In this work he characterized a novel antiviral defense mechanism involving the selective inhibition of mitochondrial oxidative metabolism in pancreatic beta cells. While working as a team member in the Yosten group, a large portion of his efforts have been directed at generating a database of spatial-transcriptomic data from human donor pancreases that will be used to further understand how the spatial organization of cells within the pancreatic islets and their molecular components shapes the development and progression of both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes.

At S&T, Dr Stafford teaches physiology lab and co-mentors the graduate students and undergraduate lab technicians in the Yosten lab, teaching them laboratory techniques, experimental design, data analysis, and helps them prepare presentations of their work and written manuscripts for publication.

Joshua has been married to his wife Sarah for 7 years and they have 4 children: Caleb (6), Levi (4), Edith (2), and Nora (1). In his spare time he is an amateur/aspiring carpenter, cook, baker, pianist, and board game designer.