Hani Suleiman, M.D., Ph.D.

Hani Suleiman, M.D., Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center and a member of its Division of Nephrology. He holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. His research focuses on  the dynamics of the actin cytoskeleton in kidney podocytes and the balance between Rho and Rac small GTPases in healthy and diseased kidneys.

Originally from Syria, Dr. Suleiman earned his medical degree from Damascus University Faculty of Medicine. He completed his doctoral degree at the University of Regensburg in Germany and received postdoctoral training at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Dr. Suleiman joined the UT Southwestern faculty in 2024. Prior to UT Southwestern, he held the role of Assistant Professor of Nephrology at Washington University School of Medicine.

Dr. Suleiman's approach to science involves the development and adaption of novel technologies to new biological questions. The cell of interest is the podocyte, an elaborate-looking cell that is important for kidney filtration function. Studying the podocytes provide an opportunity to study complex biological processes such as cell shape regulation, cell stability as well as the in-out and out-in signaling. His research interests span the areas of the actin cytoskeleton, isoactins, tropomyosins, and formins as well as questions related to the extracellular matrix and the interaction between the cells and their basement membranes.

Dr. Suleiman's interests outside science includes his family, reading, swimming, and boxing.

About the Suleiman Lab:

Dr. Suleiman’s laboratory focuses on glomerular kidney diseases such as Minimal Change Disease (MCD), Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), Diabetic Nephropathy (DN), and Transplant Glomerulopathy (TG). The common feature in these diseases is the podocytopathy. It utilizes multiple modalities of super-resolution microscopic techniques, such as STORM, Airyscan, and N-Spark, as well as Light/Electron microscopic correlative approach.

Dr. Suleiman’s laboratory recently developed a novel approach that can reveal the actin cytoskeleton in whole glomeruli, thus allowing them to interrogate the actin dynamics of podocytes in vivo, in both health and disease conditions. They also developed a new ex vivo system allowing them to study primary podocytes freshly isolated from isolated glomeruli and seeded on a defined substrate microprinted on a hydrogel system. Excitingly, this system provided, for the first time, an opportunity to observe phenomena in the primary podocytes that were never observed before. These novel techniques will help enable the design of new experiments and interpret old data differently.