NKI Seminar by K.J. Patel

K.J. Patel
Director of the Weatherall Institute Oxford University and Chief Scientist CRUK, Oxford, UK

Host: Jacqueline Jacobs

K.J. Patel: I am Kenyan British Asian and read medicine at the University of London in 1986, and trained as a gastroenterologist in London. I undertook a PhD in molecular immunology at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge after which I combined completing my medical specialist training and research supported by an MRC Clinician Scientist fellowship.
Together with Ashok Venkitaraman, we discovered that BRCA2 functioned in DNA repair. I was offered a junior group leader position at the LMB to start my own lab and I started to work on how cells fix a particular type of crosslinked DNA damage. Over the many years my lab played a central role in identifying the repair factors that remove crosslinks and showing how they work.
In 2012 I was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences and became a member of EMBO and in 2015 to the Royal Society. In 2020 I was appointed as director of the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University and the MRC Molecular Haematology Unit.