Affiliation: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital,Memphis, TN

Dr. Senthil Bhoopalan is a physician-scientist with expertise in bone marrow transplantation and bone marrow failure disorders. He received his medical degree from the Government Kilpauk Medical College, Chennai, India in 2009, and subsequently moved to the US to get more rigorous research training. He obtained his PhD in Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics from the University of Maryland in 2015 under Dr. Daniel Stein’s mentorship, where he identified a novel moonlighting function of NagZ in regulating microbial biofilms. After completing a pediatric residency at the University of Nevada, he joined St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital for fellowship training in pediatric hematology and oncology. His post-doctoral research, under the mentorship of Dr. Mitchell Weiss, is focused on bone marrow failure disorders, particularly Diamond-Blackfan anemia, and using novel tools such as lentiviral vectors, Cas9, base editors, and prime editors to develop curative therapies for patients with inherited hematopoietic failures.