CRC seminar - Professor Roger Foo

Speaker

Professor Roger Foo, NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, Singapore

Title

How we are studying cardiometabolic disease prevention in Singapore

Host

Professor Philipp Kaldis

Introduction

Prof Roger Foo is a graduate of the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine (Class of 1992). Upon graduation and national service, he spent 20 years abroad before returning to Singapore in 2013. His specialist training was undertaken at King’s College Hospital, London, and Addenbrooke’s Hospital, University of Cambridge, UK.

In 2003, Prof Foo was awarded the UK Wellcome Trust Fellowship to pursue postdoctoral molecular and cellular research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, and returned to Cambridge UK in 2006 as a British Heart Foundation Fellow and Consultant Physician, before eventually returning to Singapore. His laboratory is recognised as the first to publish an epigenomic map of the failing human heart in 2012. Now, the Foo lab continues to contribute to discoveries in the field of heart disease epigenetics and gene regulation, having published an in-depth analysis of the cardiac chromatin 3D organisation, and mapped out the mechanisms of nodal pathways that regulate cardiomyocyte cell states. The lab deep dives into the cardiac genome and epigenome, using advanced technologies of single cell transcriptomics, CRISPR gene-editing and induced pluripotent stem cells to push science at the frontiers.

Always seeking translational opportunities, Prof Foo was also the first to apply Next Generation sequencing to the cardiac clinic at National University Hospital, and established multiple research and commercial networks with collaborators and biopharma, locally and internationally.  He holds an adjunct Research Director position at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in A*STAR, and also mentors many young clinician scientists through his role as Advisor of the NUHS Clinician Scientist Academy and also nationally in the College of Clinician Scientists.