Rate My Professor Betty Raman

Betty Raman is an Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine in the Radcliffe Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford. She holds an MBBS degree and completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2015, investigating hypertrophic cardiomyopathy through multiparametric cardiac MRI. Prior to this, she finished specialist cardiology training in Australia, earning Fellowship of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (FRACP). Joining the University of Oxford in 2015, she now serves as a senior honorary consultant cardiologist at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, with expertise in advanced cardiovascular imaging such as cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) and cardiac CT, focusing on inherited and cardiomyopathic heart disease. Her leadership roles include NIHR South Central RRDN Cardiology Specialty Lead, Honorary Consultant Cardiologist, Oxford Programme Director of the British Heart Foundation Doctoral Training Programme on Technology, Data and AI (Imperial-Oxford DTP), Wellcome Career Development Award Fellow since 2024, and Radcliffe Department of Medicine Cardiovascular Medicine Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Champion. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she led the C-MORE study, a large multicentre effort combining MRI, cardiopulmonary exercise testing, and cognitive assessments to characterize long-term multi-organ consequences of the infection.

Professor Raman's research specializes in monogenic cardiac diseases like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), polygenic cardiac diseases including hypertensive and cardiometabolic conditions, and translational research bridging mechanistic discovery to clinical application and drug development innovation. Her work emphasizes early-stage disease detection and monitoring in cardiomyopathies using next-generation CMR techniques including blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) imaging, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), spectroscopy, radiomics, and artificial intelligence-based modelling. She pioneered a novel oxygen-sensitive CMR method for non-invasive detection of myocardial hypoxia as an early biomarker of disease activity in HCM. Additional interests encompass mechanistic biomarkers for early-phase trials, cross-organ interactions in cardiometabolic disease integrating heart, brain, liver, and renal imaging, and integration of imaging, genetics, energetics, and computational modelling for biomarker discovery and imaging-enabled trial design. Notable awards include the eight-year Wellcome Career Development Award (2024) for precision phenotyping in HCM, British Heart Foundation Transition Fellowship (2020), American Heart Association Melvin Judkins Early Career Clinical Investigator Award, and accolades from the European Society of Cardiology, American Heart Association, British Society of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance, Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance, and British Cardiovascular Society for her doctoral innovations. Key publications feature 'Modulating myocardial metabolism in preclinical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy pathogenic variant carriers: a window of opportunity or wishful thinking?' (Cardiovascular Research, 2025), 'Multiorgan Imaging for Interorgan Crosstalk in Cardiometabolic Diseases' (Circulation Research, 2025), 'Long COVID: post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 with a cardiovascular focus' (European Heart Journal, 2022), and 'Insights From a Novel Oxygen-Sensitive Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Method' (Circulation, 2021).