Dr. Bhat is Chair of the Department of Cellular and Integrative Physiology and holder of the Zachry Foundation Distinguished Chair in Neurosciences in the Long School of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. He received his B.S. in Biology and M.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Kashmir, India, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry/Molecular Biology jointly from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, and Shiga University of Medical Science, Shiga, Japan. He did his postdoctoral training at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics of the Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, and was awarded the Howard Temin Career Development award by the National Cancer Institute. He was recruited as an Assistant Professor by the Cardiovascular Research Institute and Brookdale Center for Developmental Biology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, and was later recruited by the Department of Cell and Molecular Physiology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine at Chapel Hill. He served as Associate Chair and Director of the Graduate Studies. In 2012, he was recruited as Chair of the Department of Cellular and Integrative Physiology at UT Health San Antonio. Dr. Bhat’s research focus has been in the area of genetic and molecular processes that underlie axonal demyelination, neurodegeneration and synaptic organization. Over the years, Dr. Bhat’s lab has made many seminal discoveries identifying several key genes that underlie the organization and maintenance of axon-glial interactions, and saltatory nerve impulse propagation. His group also uncovered the trans-synaptic mechanisms in synaptic development, and how their disruption leads to behavioral deficits. His work has been published in many leading journals including Cell, Nature and Neuron, and has authored close to 70 publications. He has trained a number of graduate and undergraduate students, and postdoctoral fellows who have gone on to become independent faculty and scientists in academia and industry. Dr. Bhat has been continuously funded by the NIH for the past two decades, and has also received funding from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, the Simons Foundation, and the Owens Foundation. He is a member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Research Foundation and serves on the executive advisory committee of the Target ALS. At UT Health, Dr. Bhat led the charge to establish the Mouse Genome Engineering and Transgenic Facility, an institutional resource that now creates genetically modified mouse models for all HSC investigators.
