Professor, Medicine
Email: ACaicedo@med.miami.edu
Research Focus: During his training years in Germany and France, Dr. Caicedo focused his research on the neuroanatomy of the auditory system at the brainstem level and inner ear. His main contribution to the field was to map the connections between the inferior colliculus and lower nuclei of the auditory brainstem using anterograde axonal tracing. During his postdoctoral training with Dr. Stephen Roper at the University of Miami, Dr. Caicedo studied how taste receptor cells detect taste stimuli. He developed a technique that allows Ca2+ imaging to be performed on taste cells within their native environment. As a result of this technical breakthrough, he published a series of papers that established the sensitivity, the specificity, and the molecular mechanisms of taste cell responses to bitter stimuli (e.g., Caicedo and Roper, 2001, Science). Following an attractive offer from Dr. Per-Olof Berggren to lead his laboratory at the Diabetes Research Institute (DRI) in Miami, Dr. Caicedo began studying the physiology of human islets in 2004. Given his background in the neurosciences, Dr. Caicedo studied neurotransmitters and helped define their role as paracrine signals within the islet. While some signaling mechanisms are similar in humans and mice (Cabrera et al., 2008, Cell Metabolism), a major finding was that human alpha cells secrete acetylcholine (Rodriguez-Diaz et al., 2011, Nature Medicine).
