Dr. Abdul Rao Is A Renowned Doctor And Medical Researcher

Dr. Abdul Rao MD, MA, DPhil, was appointed as the Senior Associate and Vice President for Research and Graduate studies at USF Health. He was also the Vice Dean for Research and Graduate Studies for the College of Medicine. Dr. Abdul Rao at USF Health was the in charge of research for three main colleges- medicine, nursing and public health. His constant effort was to bridge research across USF and USF Health campuses.

Abdul S. Rao is a renowned doctor who received his medical degree from Dow Medical University, Karachi, Pakistan in 1983. As soon as his Orthopedic Surgery training was completed, he joined the Department of Physiology at Boston University School Medicine and then graduated in 1989 with a Masters in Physiology. In addition to that, he also completed a year of post-doctoral Research Fellowship in the Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School. From 1990 to 1993, Dr. Abdul Rao joined the Nuffield Department of Surgery as a Clinical Instructor, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. He later graduated with a D.Phil. (Doctor of Philosophy) in Transplantation Immunology in 1993. His research interest focused on bench to bedside (and reverse) translation of novel therapeutic strategies aimed at alleviating a clinical problem.

Dr. Abdul Rao, along with his group worked on the protocol of induction of donor-specific tolerance in organ allograft recipients (funded by National Institutes of Health); cellular therapeutic treatment of refractory post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorders (funded by Cancer Research Treatment Foundation); islet cell transplantation to reverse type I insulin-dependent diabetes (funded by National Institutes of Health and the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International); transmission of infection following animals to humans (funded by an extramural grant) organ and cell transplantation. Other than that, his group has also been proactively involved in basic cellular and molecular biology research in the following areas: induction of tolerance, dendritic and NK cell immunobiology, post-transplant vasculopathy (chronic rejection); islet cell transplantation, liver-derived growth factors; generation of transgenic pigs and xenotransplantation.