Professor Shoumo Bhattacharya is a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow in Clinical Science inf Oxford. His current programme of work in cardiac biology commenced with molecular dissection of pathways that are mutated (and associated with congenital heart disease) in Rubinstein-Taybi Syndrome. Starting from this focus he has dissected molecular pathways whose integrity is critical for cardiac development. The work has been published in a series of high quality papers that have gained him international recognition as a leader in this field. Importantly the work defines molecular links between pathways regulating lateralization and cardiac development – why is the left, left and the right right in the heart. He has linked the p300 interacting protein Cited2 to regulation of critical pathways involved in left-right patterning. The work has also defined pathways for analysis in non-syndromic congenital heart disease, and in collaboration he recently reported mutations of Cited2 in a significant proportion of such individuals. This sets the stage for a new understanding of these diseases at the level of clinical and molecular genetics. The work is an excellent example of the application of diverse methodologies in molecular and cellular biology to a medical problem. It involves innovative approaches, such as the application of MRI to the imaging of mouse embryos, which will have implications outside this particular field. We welcome him to the fellowship today.