Jahar Bhattacharya

Jahar Bhattacharya is Professor of Medicine and of Physiology & Cellular Biophysics at Columbia, Director of Lung Research for the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, director of the Lung Biology Laboratory and program director of the division's NHLBI T32 training grant in lung science. He graduated in medicine from AIIMS New Delhi (1968), went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar for an MSc and DPhil (1976) after a cardiology residency at the Radcliffe Infirmary, and did postdoctoral work at UCSF's Cardiovascular Research Institute. His lab pioneered real-time optical imaging of intact lungs and has used it to show mitochondrial transfer from stromal cells to alveolar epithelium (Nature Medicine 2012), connexin-43 gap-junction signaling between sessile alveolar macrophages and epithelium (Nature 2014), and more recently mitochondrial calcium uniporter control of surfactant secretion and macrophage-targeted therapy for ventilator-induced lung injury; he has patented a biologic being tested preclinically for ARDS. His lab has held uninterrupted NIH funding for more than 35 years, including R01 HL036024 (continuously since 1985), an NIH MERIT award and current R01 HL169515, and he has mentored more than 45 investigators. He is a past Chair of the ATS Pulmonary Circulation Assembly and has received the ATS Recognition Award for Scientific Accomplishments, the APS Comroe Lecture and the 2019 ATS Amberson Lecture.