Prof Roger Foo

Roger Foo is the inaugural Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan Professor of Medicine at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, Director of the NUHS Cardiovascular Disease Translational Research Programme, Dy Director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute, Assistant Dean (Research), Head of the NUHS Clinician Scientist Academy, and Senior Consultant lead for the Cardiac Genetics Clinic, National University Heart Centre. He is a graduate of the Medical School at NUS, and spent 20 years abroad before returning to Singapore in 2013. His specialist training was undertaken at Kings College Hospital, London, and Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. In 2003, he was awarded the Wellcome Trust Fellowship to pursue research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, and returned to Cambridge in 2006 as a British Heart Foundation Fellow and Consultant Physician, before eventually returning to Singapore. His lab was the first to publish an epigenomic map of the failing human heart in 2012. More recently, his lab has published an in-depth analysis of the cardiac chromatin 3D organisation, and also reported the discovery of a long noncoding RNA, called Singheart, which regulates key cardiac gene expression. The approach of the lab is to deep dive into the epigenome of the heart, using advanced technology including single cell transcriptomics and Crispr-genome editing to explore frontiers, in continuing aspirations to discover novel avenues for therapies or biomarkers. Roger is also a keen advocate for the application of Next Generation sequencing based genomics to the clinic.