Biography

Dr. Raj Kumar is a Post Doctoral Research Scientist at Department of Physiology, School of Medicine, University of Tennessee Health Science Center at Memphis city of Tennessee State in United State of America. He is a Protein and Molecular Biologist, graduated from Ranchi University, India. He has completed his Masters in Science (M.Sc.) and doctoral degree (Ph.D) in Animal Biochemistry from the National Dairy Research Institute, India. His Ph.D. thesis was a study of molecular mechanisms of cryocapacitation associated sperm fertility damages in comparison to the normal physiological sperm capacitation. He identified a novel marker of sperm cryocapacitation. During his Ph.D. studies, Dr. Kumar was influenced by the work of Ophthalmologist Lloyd Paul Aiello, Physiologist Peter Carmeliet and Holger Gerhardt. He became interested in the work of scientists working at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center with objective to study the regulation and signal transduction mechanisms of hypoxia induced VEGF expression in retina and investigate their role in pathological retinal neovascularization. His publications include one book chapters, and over 29 articles in peer-reviewed journals including Nature’s Scientific Reports, Journal of Cell Science and EBioMedicine. His one of the research paper investigating “A new role of cofilin in retinal neovascularization” was placed in cover story of Journal of Cell Science (129:1234-1249) His Other publication includes, 28 abstracts Published in international and national conferences/seminar, 9 full paper in Published in Training, Seminar and Conferences and 6 papers published as popular articles. Dr. Kumar is recipient of external fellowship like ICAR-SRF from Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Government of India. He also a recipient of Institute Fellowship of National Dairy Research Institute for his master degree. He has cleared prestigious National Eligibility Test in Life Science conducted by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. He as also got many awards for research and poster presentation including Young Scientist Award at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, (BHU), India.


Research Interest

Basic research to investigate the mechanism and regulation of VEGF signaling in hypoxia induced pathological retinal neovascularization.