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