Dr Kareem Salhiyyah has is one of the very few Surgeon-Scientist.
He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree from the prestigious Imperial college London (Ranked second university in the world in 2014) working with Prof Sir Magdi Yacoub and Dr Adrian Chester on the role of hypoxia on interstitial mitral valve cells.
He was the first to study the effect and requirement of oxygen on the mitral valve cells. This work was part of the bigger project to understand more about the physiology of the mitral valve, the way it works, and how does it get diseased. The ultimate target is to make a tissue engineered human heart valve by replicating the physiological conditions on specialised stem cells.
This interesting field of cellular oxygen sensing is very exciting, and was the topic which won the Noble prize in 2019.