Ankit Bharat, MBBS
Photo: Ankit Bharat

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Elected 2019

Ankit Bharat is the Harold L. and Margaret N. Method Professor of Surgery, Chief of Thoracic Surgery, and the Director of Lung Transplantation at Northwestern University in Chicago. He received medical training at Christian Medical College in India following which he joined Washington University in St Louis. There, he completed general surgery residency and cardiothoracic surgery fellowship as well as a post-doctoral research fellowship. At Northwestern, he treats patients with advanced thoracic diseases and provides therapies such as lung transplantation and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation to those with end-stage lung failure. In addition, he provides minimally invasive treatment to patients with thoracic malignancies including robotic and video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery. His basic science laboratory investigates immunopathogenesis of lung disease with a focus on transplant immunobiology. Using research tools such as single cell transcriptomics, top-down proteomics, intravital imaging, and multichannel flow-cytometry, in combination with bioinformatics and computational biology, his research group is interested in identifying clinically actionable mechanisms underlying lung injury and utilizing models relevant to human disease. His laboratory is also interested in intravital imaging of immune responses after transplantation to determine the mechanisms of neutrophil recruitment into the lungs. For example, using these tools, they have identified the presence of pulmonary intravascular non-classical monocytes and their pivotal role in initiating lung ischemia-reperfusion injury. He pursues problem-based surgical research by taking important clinical problems to the basic laboratory and their clinical lung transplant program allows his research team to validate their laboratory findings in humans.