In a recent award ceremony held in Tampa city in Florida (USA), Professor Dr. Hoshang Jehangir Unwalla was awarded the ‘2022-23 Outstanding Mentor Award’ from Florida Education Fund’s McKnight Doctoral Fellowship Program. The McKnight program aims to increase the number of African Americans and Hispanics in Florida who earn PhDs. Unwalla’s lab in the Department of Immunology and Nano-Medicine, studies lung diseases in HIV smokers and non-smokers to develop therapeutic drugs to improve or arrest lung function decline in these diseases. Prof. Unwalla was nominated by his graduate student, Maria Santiago, who is working on her PhD in Biochemistry.

Hoshang Jehangir Unwalla obtained his Ph.D. at the National Institute of Immunology, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India. As a post-doctoral fellow at the Beckman Research Institute (CA), his research involved designing gene therapy approaches to suppress HIV replication. During his post-doctoral fellowship, he was awarded the prestigious Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) fellowship, one of the four awarded worldwide, that cycle.

In 2008, he moved to the University of Miami as Research Assistant Professor in Immunotherapy, where he developed an interest in HIV and lung disease. In 2009, he branched into pulmonary medicine with a goal towards developing research projects in pulmonary complications in smokers and HIV patients. He is currently funded by Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Defense to support his research.