Welcome to the Hwa Lab!

Dr Hwa’s overall interests have been on translational studies (from bench to bedside) in the broad area of cardiovascular disease. Over his career, he has studied how mutations affect the functions of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), how these receptors influence platelet function, and how hyperglycemia causes platelet dysfunction in diabetes mellitus (DM), exacerbating cardiovascular disease. Dr Hwa received his Medical Degree with first class honors from the University of Sydney in Australia. He completed residency in Internal Medicine and a Fellowship in Cardiology at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney. He then pursued graduate studies (Department of Molecular Cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic and the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Case Western Reserve University) where he developed his interests in the structure and function of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) under the mentorship of Robert M. Graham MD and Dianne Perez PhD. Dr Hwa was then awarded a Howard Hughes Physician Postdoctoral Fellowship to further study structure and function of GPCRs at MIT in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate, H. Gobind Khorana. At MIT, using a mass spectrometry approach, Dr. Hwa discovered how naturally occurring mutations in rhodopsin mutations lead to Retinitis Pigmentosa by locking the receptor in a misfolded conformation through abnormal disulfide bond formation¹.