Heda Lab awarded $42,000 in grants to continue cystic fibrosis research
Dr. Ghanshyam Heda, professor of biology at Mississippi University for Women and founder of the Heda Lab, was recently awarded two grants totaling $42,000 to further research on cystic fibrosis (CF).
“This funding is instrumental in furthering our research and will support two key publications and the training of undergraduate students,” said Dr. Heda. “These grants ensure that we can continue to offer transformative research opportunities to W students from diverse majors like biology, chemistry and psychology.”
The grants are the Mississippi NASA Space Grant Consortium, which is $20,000, and the Mississippi-INBRE (a biomedical research organization), which is $22,000.
The funds will allow the Heda Lab to hire two to three students to work in his laboratory. Over the years, Dr. Heda’s lab has become a hub for hands-on undergraduate research, contributing to the success of alumni who have gone on to medical school, doctoral programs and academic careers.
The research is a collaborative effort spanning three countries.
Heda said, “A large research institution in India is providing me with the compounds. My laboratory is working on the biochemical and molecular aspects of the project. I initiated collaboration with Dr. David Sheppard, professor of physiology at the University of Bristol, UK, during my visit to his laboratory during my second sabbatical in spring 2022. He is providing me with data on the physiological aspects of these compounds.”
Dr. Heda first started working with undergraduates in his lab in 2009. In the 15 years since then, he has had more than 20 biology, chemistry, psychology and nursing undergraduate majors under his supervision.
“These grants will allow me to work on different aspects of a project to determine the efficacy of small chemical compounds in correcting defects in a protein called CFTR. A defective (or mutated) CFTR is responsible for causing the genetic disease cystic fibrosis, common among the Caucasians of Northern European origin,” said Heda.
Before joining The W in 2008, Heda worked in academia, industry and government. A tenured faculty member since 2017, he obtained a doctorate in genetics from Osmania University, India (1983), two post-doctoral fellowships at Northwestern University School of Medicine at Chicago (1983-84) and at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (1984-87). Throughout his career, Heda has traveled widely the world and established collaborations specifically with scientists in Japan, Portugal, India and the United Kingdom. Some of the significant awards include JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Fellowship (2000), Stickel Award in Podiatric Medicine (2009) and Fulbright U.S. Senior Scholarship (2018).