Administration - Faculty | Girish J. Kotwal, Ph.D
Professor, Pharmaceutical Sciences
Education:
McMaster University Health Sciences Center, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Ph.D. in Biochemistry
The University of Bombay, India
M.Sc. Medical Biochemistry
B.Sc. (Hons) Microbiology
B.Sc. (Hons) Chemistry
Areas of Interest:
Microbiology and Immunology, Biopharmaceuticals translational research and evidence based studies of Natural Products
Contact Information:
E-mail: gkotwal@sullivan.edu
Office Phone: 502-413-8973
Office Fax: 502-515-4669
Curriculum Vitae/Activities [pdf]
Biography
Following completing of his Ph.D, Dr. Kotwal joined the Laboratory of viral diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD, USA as a visiting fellow (1984-1987) funded by the Fogarty Foundation. He later became visiting associate (1987-1990). During the five year period he received training in virology, sequencing and mapping of poxviral genes involved in the evasion of host defense and the use of vaccinia virus vectors for expression of foreign genes. He then joined the James N. Gamble Institute of Medical Research as an Assistant Member and was involved in developing diagnostic tools for Hepatitis C virus. He was then a faculty member in the school of Medicne at the University of Louisville where he mentored about a dozen graduate students and directed the work on the structural biology of vaccinia virus complement control protein (VCP) and preclinical research leading to the evaluation of VCP in a number of inflammatory diseases like Alzhemer's Disease, rheumathoid Arthritis, traumatic brain and spinal cord injury etc. This work was supported by funding from the Kentucky spinal cord and head injury research trust and the Jewish Hospital Research foundation. He continued the work on the structure-function studies with support from the Wellcome Trust of England. During the past 3 years, he established biotech companies to gain intellectual property protection for the utility of VCP. He has 90 pubmed publications, about ten issued and pending US and European patents.
