Rate My Professor Shoumo Bhattacharya

Shoumo Bhattacharya is Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine in the Radcliffe Department of Medicine Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford, based at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics. He qualified with MBBS in 1983 and MD in 1985 from the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, focusing his MD thesis on the immunology of rheumatic fever. He earned a Masters degree in Biochemistry with Distinction from King's College London in 1992. Following clinical training in Cardiology at Northwick Park Hospital and research on myocardial imaging agents, he served as an MRC Training Fellow in James Scott’s group at the Clinical Research Centre, Harrow, in 1990. In 1994, with BHF and NIH fellowships, he joined David Livingston’s laboratory at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, elucidating roles of EP300/CREBBP in interferon signalling and discovering CITED2 in hypoxia signalling. As Wellcome Senior Research Fellow at Oxford from 1998 to 2008, he established CITED2’s functions in left-right patterning and heart development, and applied high-throughput magnetic resonance microscopy to uncover genetic roles in cardiovascular development, including PCSK5 in antero-posterior patterning. He founded the BHF Genetic Origins of Congenital Heart Disease Study and contributed to the UK10K Consortium on genetics of human cardiac malformations. Appointed BHF Chair in 2009 and Statutory Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine in 2010, he holds honors including Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (2003), Graham Bull Prize (2005), and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2006). Since 2015, his laboratory develops therapeutics from tick salivary evasin proteins targeting chemokine networks in inflammatory diseases.

His influential publications include 'Discovery and pharmacophoric characterization of chemokine network inhibitors using phage-display, saturation mutagenesis and computational modelling' (Vales et al., Nature Communications, 2023), 'Evasins: Tick Salivary Proteins that Inhibit Mammalian Chemokines' (Bhusal et al., Trends in Biochemical Sciences, 2020), 'Cited2 controls left-right patterning and heart development through a Nodal-Pitx2c pathway' (Bamforth et al., Nature Genetics, 2004), and 'Cardiac malformations, adrenal agenesis, neural crest defects and exencephaly in mice lacking Cited2' (Bamforth et al., Nature Genetics, 2001).