Photo courtesy Delta State University

Tony Sultani, an oncology specialist who has practiced in the Mississippi Delta for 23 years, recently donated to Delta State University to support the construction of the university's new Financial Investing & Research Lab in the DSU College of Business and Aviation.

DUS's 24-station lab will instruct business majors on financial advising, stock market analysis and trading, as well as offer financial literacy resources to the Mississippi Delta community and conduct seminars and lectures on topics such as money management and budgeting.

"I made this donation to Delta State because I feel that many people in the Delta have low financial literacy in general, even among doctors and other educated people," Sultani says. "There is a great need to educate people on investing in order to help the Delta community, and I felt that the lab at Delta State would help with that and with opening new avenues for business graduates."

Sultani works as a medical oncologist at Cancer Center facilities in Greenville, Cleveland and Clarksdale, Miss. In his position he treats colon and lung cancer patients and provides chemo and radiation therapy for breast and prostate cancer. He has been with the Cancer Center since 1997.

It was Sultani's older brother, Nabil Abil Sultani, who inspired Sultani to pursue medicine after Nabil became a doctor himself, Sultani says. Abil is currently a gastroenterologist practicing in Michigan.

"Medicine has long been a passion for me, and cancer in particular because there is such a desperate need for treatment for it," Sultani says. "Many modern medications require a constantly evolving field, and not many can practice oncology. That was a true challenge for me."

Sultani was born in the village of Ain Dabesh near Damascus, Syria. He went to Damascus Medical School at Damascus University and received his medical degree in 1984. He then did four years of orthopedics work in a residency program at Aleppo University in Syria. In 1988 he immigrated to the United States and began training in medical oncology and internal medicine at Providence Health Systems in Michigan until 1993. He ran a private practice in Nebraska for two years before moving to Clarksdale to work with the Cancer Center there.

In 2019, Sultani donated $10,000 to DSU to create the Sultani Endowment Scholarship Fund, which provides scholarship support to qualified business majors.

Sultani and his wife, Wafa, have been married since 1998. They have a son, George, and three daughters, Natalia, Daniella and Alyssa. George graduated from DSU with a political science degree in 2017.