Mrs. Anwari Akhter

Mrs. Anwari Akhter received her B.Sc. (Honors) degree in Biological Science from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh and M.Sc. degree in Microbiology with research at the International Center for Diarrheal Diseases Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR). She joined Texas Biomed in Dr. Torrelles laboratory in 2017 with 11 years of research and laboratory management experience at The Ohio State University. She is actively involved in both host-pathogen interaction research in the lab and overseeing day-to-day management of the lab. One of her research focuses is to understand the factors and/or mechanisms behind how the human lung mucosa (or alveolar lining fluid, ALF) of people living with HIV play roles in impairing host responses to subsequent infection with M. tuberculosis. She is currently involved in a research project to study the mitochondrial dysfunction in aged lung leading to susceptibility to respiratory diseases. Concurrently, she is also involved in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) research, which includes the validation of small animal models, where she is performing immunohistochemistry and confocal microscopy to demonstrate the dissemination of SARS-CoV-2 to different organs of animals after infection.