BME graduate student, Tamanna Islam, recently received a 2024 Predoctoral Fellowship in Drug Discovery from the national PhRMA Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing biopharmaceutical innovation and value-driven health care by offering competitive grants and fellowships to early career researchers.
Tamanna Islam performs her research under joint Biomedical Engineering/Molecular Pharmaceutics faculty Taslim Al-Hilal. Her PhD work focuses on developing innovative drug delivery systems and exploring new therapeutic targets for disease treatment. Her interdisciplinary approach integrates chemistry, biology, and engineering to tackle complex medical challenges. Specifically, she designs and fabricates microfluidic devices useful in drug discovery and diagnostics. She is also investigating cell-specific durotaxis as a target for novel therapeutics in pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a condition marked by elevated blood pressure in the lungs.
Tamanna holds both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry, specializing in Electroanalytical Chemistry, from Jagannath University, Bangladesh. Her master’s research focused on the creation of cost-effective electrochemical sensors for biomolecule detection, with significant applications in clinical diagnostics. During this period, she published over 15 papers and a book chapter and was awarded the National Science and Technology Fellowship for her thesis work. She has two first authored and four co-authored publications from her work in the UTEP rotation lab, including a comprehensive review on mucoadhesive nanoparticles for oral drug delivery in the Journal of Controlled Release.
Upon completing her academic training, Tamanna aspires to become an independent investigator. Her PhRMA Foundation fellowship represents a significant milestone towards achieving this goal.
Click here to see the PhRMA Foundation’s interview with Tamanna Islam.