Pakistani Physician-Scientist Awarded $4m For Outstanding Medical Research

For outstanding medical research which led to cutting-edge research on heart transplantation, Pakistani physician-scientist Dr Faisal H Cheema was awarded $4 million.

Dr Cheema hails from the rural area of Wazirabad who got his education from Crescent Model School and Government College Lahore before moving to Karachi to attend his medical school at Aga Khan University.

After graduation, he moved to the USA and further trained and worked at Columbia University in New York, Loyola University in Illinois, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland and the University of California Berkley. He is currently a faculty member at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Heart Institute in Houston, Texas.

Dr Cheema has also served as a senator for the Ivy-League Columbia University and is involved with several professional, academic, community and philanthropic organisations. His passionate and selfless work for young physicians culminated in the establishment of Committee for Young Physicians within Association of Physicians of Pakistani-descent of North America (APPNA), on which he served for more than a decade, included a term as its chair.

He has helped hundreds of students in their search for residencies and or advancing their medical careers in the USA. He loves to mentor medical students and young physicians.

Ever since he left Pakistan, he continues to collaborate with various institutions like Aga Khan University, Punjab Institute of Cardiology, Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology, National University of Medical Sciences (NUMS), Shifa College of Medicine and others, and guides students from medical schools across the country.

Dr Cheema has also published more than 110 scientific manuscripts in high impact journals. In due course of time, through strategic partnerships among academic, corporate, governmental and philanthropic institutions, his mission is to make heart and lung transplant and artificial devices for end-stage heart failure and lung disease a reality in Pakistan.

He also aspires to develop a national organ donation and allocation system for Pakistan.

Dr Faisal Cheema and his colleague Dr Jeffrey A Morgan have been awarded $4 million in funding from Brockman Medical Research Foundation to lead cutting-edge research on heart transplantation.

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