Abraham Alahmad, PhD, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, USA
Editorial Board Member
Dr Abraham Alahmad received his PhD degree in 2009 in Human Physiology at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) after his training in the blood-brain barrier response to hypoxia in the Department of Veterinary Physiology, under the supervision of Dr ‘Lara Ogunshola. He completed two postdoctoral trainings. Under the supervision of Dr Gregory Bix (Texas A&M University, USA), he focused on understanding the role of the extracellular matrix following ischemic stroke injury; followed by a second training under Dr Eric Shusta (University of Wisconsin, USA) in which he gained skills in the use of patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) for modelling the human blood-brain barrier in vitro. During this training, he started to develop such a model as a drug discovery and disease modeling platform.
Dr Al Ahmad is currently an associate professor at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Jerry H. Hodge School of Pharmacy. He is pursuing his research on the use of iPSCs to model how environmental (e.g. hypoxia, toxicants) and genetics (neurogenetic disorders) influence the blood-brain barrier integrity in several diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, cerebral hypoxia/ischemia and GLUT1 deficiency.