Dr. Manvendra K Singh, an Indian scientist from Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur city, has been awarded a grant of SGD 3mn (about Rs. 14.7 crore) by the National Research Foundation, Singapore, to research in congenital and adult cardiovascular diseases. The NRF, a department within the Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore, is responsible for developing strategies, policies and plans for research, innovation and enterprise. Dr. Singh, who works as an assistant professor in the cardiovascular and metabolic disorders programme at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, said he is among the seven young scientists from across the world to be endowed with the Singapore NRF fellowship to carry out cutting-edge research this year.
He has been awarded the fellowship to pursue research in the field of congenital and adult cardiovascular diseases.
Singh said his research interest is to study congenital and adult heart diseases, which are the leading causes of mortality worldwide. In Singapore, cardiovascular disease accounted for 30 per cent of the total deaths in 2014.
“Our laboratory studies the molecular mechanisms that regulate cardiovascular development, homeostasis and disease.
Our goal is to understand how signaling pathways and transcriptional networks regulate cardiovascular cell lineages differentiation and their interaction during heart morphogenesis.
“Our work aims for better understanding of congenital human diseases of the heart by establishing mouse models for these disorders and delineating the molecular changes associated with them,” he said. Singh, also an adjunct assistant professor at National Heart Research Institute Singapore and Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, University of Pennsylvania, USA.
He did MSc Biotechnology from Madurai Kamaraj University before joining MD/Ph.D program in Molecular Medicine at Hannover Medical School, Germany.
Singh further said he has also been awarded PhD prize from Hannover Biomedical Research School, Germany for his PhD thesis, excellent performance as an international student and for his social and cultural engagement.
“Our long-term goal is to apply lessons learned from our developmental studies to better understand and treat cardiovascular diseases,” he added. - PTI
