The Unit is delighted to announce the appointment of three new group leaders: Mike Chapman, Ritwick Sawarkar and Kiran Patil. 

Mike Chapman

Mike’s programme will focus on the toxicity of CAR-T cell therapy. The lab will be combining genomic and proteomic approaches with more traditional ‘wet lab’ techniques to dissect the heterogeneity of immune effector cells to better understand the toxicity and efficacy of immune therapies.

Mike has been running his independent laboratory within the Department of Haematology at the University of Cambridge for the last five years, supported by a Wellcome Intermediate Clinical Fellowship. In addition to his research activities, Mike is the clinical lead for myeloma at Addenbrookes.  

Ritwick Sawarkar

Ritwick’s programme will focus on how cells respond to environmental stress and toxins by mounting an adaptive stress response in order to survive stressful conditions. The approaches include genomics, single-cell transcriptomics, proteomics, chromatin biochemistry as well as genome-wide screening to identify novel components of stress-response pathways.

Ritwick was an Independent Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany.  He completed his PhD at the Indian Institute of Science.  He recently has been awarded the ERC Consolidator Award and awarded Alfred Tissières Young Investigator Award by the Cell Stress Society, USA.

Kiran Patil

Kiran’s lab uses a combination of modelling, bioinformatics, and experimental approaches for discovering and modulating (xeno-)metabolic interactions towards personalized medicine.

Kiran was previously a Group Leader at the Structural & Computational Biology Unit, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany.  He led a team of 14 researchers and provided mentoring to PhD students as well as Fellows.