May 2025
The lab made a strong showing at the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) annual conference. Carol Morris and Christian Mitchell presented research posters, with Christian’s abstract receiving one of the highest scores in her section, securing her a spot in the highly competitive Members-in-Training (MIT) poster competition. Further highlighting the laboratory’s accomplishments, Dr. Rami Shahror and Bushra Zaman were selected to give oral (paper) presentations. Bushra’s selection came with an added distinction—she was awarded a travel grant to support her attendance at the conference.
April 2025
Assistant professor Esraa Shosha was awarded a highly competitive Career Development Award from the American Heart Association. The three-year award will support her groundbreaking research project titled “Role of endothelial HDAC3 in proliferative retinopathy.” The award total was $231,000
Dr. Shosha was also awarded a travel award to attend the ASPET annual meeting and present her work as oral and poster presentations.
January 2025
Dr. Rami Shahror receives an American Heart Association (AHA) Postdoctoral Fellowship Award. The award titled “Role of myeloid HDAC3 in retinal neurovascular injury” provides a total support of $176,000 for two years.
September 2024
Christian Mitchell, M.S., received the T-SPaT Fellowship in August.
The goal of the T-SPaT program is to train students to use an in vivo approach to answer relevant questions in pharmacology and toxicology with emphasis on metabolism, drug design, pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, and signaling.
Only two second year students from GPIBS and one M.D./Ph.D. student each year will be supported by T-SPaT. This prestigious and competitive fellowship offers the student 12 months of stipend support, tuition, graduate school fees, and $300 to attend a national meeting. There is also $4,200 to spend on health insurance, or research supplies. The fellowship is for two years for GPIBS students.
Congratulations Christian!
June 2024
Assistant Professor Esraa Shosha has been awarded a one-year, $90,000 Knights Templar Eye Foundation Career Starter Grant for her project titled “Endothelial HDAC3 mediates pathological angiogenesis in retinopathy of prematurity.” Dr. Fouda serves as the preceptor for this grant, with co-mentorship from Professors and Chairs Dr. Rusch and Dr. Phillips. This project which can be renewed for another year aims to investigate new treatments for retinopathy of prematurity, a major cause of blindness in children. Esraa currently holds Early-stage investigator status until 2027 and aspires to leverage this grant to secure a larger R-type grant in the future.
May 2024
Melissa Wild has been accepted into the genetic counseling graduate program at UAMS for Fall 2024. This program is extremely competitive with more than 100 applicants annually and they accept only eight students.
The genetic counseling program has a two-year curriculum followed by a board-certified genetic counselor exam.
April 2024
Carol Morris received outstanding achievement awards and plaques in the graduate school Spring Award Reception for her fellowships from AHA, PhRMA foundation, and ARVO. Mentor Dr. Fouda received Excellence in Mentoring Award.
March 2024
Shout out to Dr. Shahror who presented at Student Research Day and took home the second-place postdoctoral fellow award for his poster titled “Myeloid HDAC3 Deletion Prevents Retinal Neovascular Degeneration in a Mouse Model of Retinal Ischemia-Reperfusion.”
Grants
Our lab received a Hornick award for a year titled ‘The Role of Clusterin in Ischemic Stroke.’
New Lab Members
Seif Abdelnaem (SURP student)
Seif joins the lab from University of Central Arkansas. He is supported by the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP). Seif’s passion lies in understanding the research process and exploring how the concepts studied in the lab are practically applied beyond its confines. Seif long-term goal is to go to medical school.
Pooja Modi (Medical student)
Pooja is an M2 student. She is participating in the Honors in Research Program through the College of Medicine. Pooja’s goal is to get more research experience, especially research that is medicine focused. Pooja is leaning towards Emergency Medicine at this time; however, she has not even rotations yet, so this is very likely to change once she experience different specialties.
Former Lab Members
Aya Ahmed (Academic visitor)
Aya is a visiting research scholar from Egypt supported by the USAID. She graduated from College of Pharmacy, the British University in Egypt (BUE) with a bachelor’s degree in pharmaceutical sciences in 2021 (ranked the first on her class). She is also a master’s student and a teaching research assistant at BUE at the department of Pharmacology and Biochemistry. She is interested in learning new techniques in the neuroscience field and utilizing different in vivo and invitro retinopathy models in the lab.
December 2023
Dr. Shosha’s research proposal titled “Role of Endothelial HDAC3 in Pathological Retinal Angiogenesis of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR)” has been awarded funding by the UAMS Sturgis Foundation 2024 Award Program ($25,000). The project aims to shed light on the underlying mechanisms of DR, a leading cause of blindness in the world. Dr. Fouda serves as a collaborator on the project.
November 2023
Carol Morris, a GPIBS graduate student, is being awarded a 2024 PhRMA Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship in Drug Discovery Targets and Pathways for her project aimed at finding new treatments for Ischemic Stroke. The grant provides support for promising students in advanced stages of training and thesis research in drug discovery research. The $62,000 grant will cover Carol’s yearly stipend for up to two years.
September 2023
Ph.D. candidate Carol Morris received a $107,222 supplement from the National Eye Institute to pursue her Ph.D. studies in Fouda’s lab. The supplement to Dr. Fouda’s R00 covers Carol’s stipend and includes a 53% indirect cost to UAMS.
May 2023
Carol’s team won first place at Healthcare Innovation Sprint: The Healthcare Innovation Sprint is hosted by the Conductor, Arkansas INBRE, and BioVentures. It guides students through an immersive, five-day training program in which they learn about healthcare innovation, how to identify potential problems, talk to key stakeholders and customers to gather information, and develop a solution. The sprint creates entrepreneurial and interactive learning opportunities for students. Carol’s team members included Nadia Amidu and Sudip Panday and their mentor was John Nabholz. Their project focused on early identification of hospital-acquired infections for which they were awarded $2,500.
The lab and department administration say farewell to Aya who finished her USAID-sponsored scholarship after four productive months of research and presentations.
Postdoc fellow Dr. Rami Shahror was a speaker at a research webinar organized by the Journal of Visual Experiments (JOVE) and had more than 100 participants. He discussed a paper that he published before titled ‘Tracking Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide-labeled Mesenchymal Stem Cells using MRI after Intranasal Delivery in a Traumatic Brain Injury Murine Model’.
April 2023
Fouda lab had a busy Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) 2023 meeting in New Orleans. Post-doctoral fellow Dr. Rami Shahror presented an oral talk titled: Myeloid HDAC3 deletion mitigates ischemic retinal neurovascular injury. Graduate student Carol Morris presented a poster titled: HDAC3 Mediates Retinal Endothelial Cell Angiogenesis In Vitro. Dr. Fouda moderated a session and participated as one of the leads in the ‘breakfast with the experts’ session.
March 2023
Second year Ph.D. student Carol Morris, from Dr. Fouda’s lab won the first place in the 3MT (3-minute thesis competition) at UAMS. Presentation title: Protection against CNS injury by disrupting the CD47/SIRPα Axis
October 2022
Dr. Fouda’s recent article in Cell Death and Disease is featured in the NIH/NEI news. The article in which Dr. Fouda is the first author showed the beneficial effect of pegylated Arginase 1 (a pharmaceutical grade of the enzyme arginase) as a translational therapy for limiting retinal injury and promoting repair during proliferative retinopathy which occurs in diabetic retinopathy and retinopathy of prematurity. Dr. Fouda shares a pending use patent with his former mentor (Dr. Caldwell) on the use of arginase for the treatment of ischemic retinopathies.
Post-doctoral fellow Rami Shahror, won first place for his poster presentation on
“Deleterious Role of Myeloid HDAC3 in Retinal Neurovascular Injury” and Ph.D. student Carol Morris, won third place for her poster presentation on “Investigation of the Retinal Metabolic Function in Type 1 Diabetes Akita Mice” at the South-Central Chapter for Society of Toxicology conference held at UAMS
September 2022
Graduate student Carol Morris speaks at the Ophthalmology Grand Rounds as part of a collaboration with Jones Eye Institute at UAMS. The collaboration with Dr. Ahmed Sallam involves an IRB protocol to collect human vitreous samples from diabetic patients.
July 2022
Graduate student Carol Morris secured third place for her poster presentation at the ArkanSono conference.
Serving on the ARVO Members in Training committee, Dr. Fouda organized a grant writing workshop for early-stage vision scientists through ARVO.
June 2022
Dr. Fouda and Dr. Shosha were invited to speak at their alma mater, Cairo University. Dr. Fouda presented two lectures to postgraduate students on Stroke Therapeutics and Alzheimer’s Disease at his alma mater, Cairo University (CU). One lecture was over Zoom and the other one was given in person during Dr. Fouda’s recent trip to Egypt. Dr. Shosha presented a lecture on the recent advances in Diabetic Retinopathy. CU is Egypt’s premier public university, and the lectures were part of the Pharmacy School’s post-graduate PharmD program which involves speakers from Egypt’s leading health institutes and abroad.
April 2022
Dr. Fouda received a travel grant to attend the Retinal Ganglion Cells Repopulation, Stem Cell Transplantation, & Optic Nerve Regeneration ‘RReSTORe’ Workshop in Denver on April 30. The workshop is part of a consortium organized by Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute and aims to advance translational development of vision restoration therapies for glaucoma and other primary optic neuropathies by assembling an international group of more than 100 leading and emerging investigators from related fields.
January 2022
A picture from the lab is featured in Vector lab 2022 calendar