Dr Vinoj George achieved a Masters in Molecular Genetics from the University of Leicester, focusing on a project investigating the molecular mechanisms of human vascular aging, which sparked his interest in cardiovascular research.

This led the way to a joint Ph.D. programme with the Cell Cycle Group, MRC, Harwell, Oxfordshire under Dr Tim Humphrey and the Cardiovascular Research Group at the University of Reading under Professor Gavin Brooks, this project being awarded an Overseas Research Scholarship (ORS) by Universities UK.

The aim of the Ph.D. project was to investigate the effect of cellular stress (pressure, oxidative and osmotic stresses) on cell cycle and cell signalling, with the ultimate goal of understanding the mechanism of an important cardiovascular condition triggered by stress, pathological cardiac hypertrophy, using fission yeast as a model organism.

Besides identifying for the first time the mechanism of cell cycle delay after pressure stress, the importance of the stress signalling pathway in viability and the cell cycle in this response was also discovered.

In keeping with the interest of stress-driven cell cycle response in cardiovascular biology, Vinoj recently joined the group headed by Dr Jian-Mei Li at the University of Surrey as a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Wellcome Trust. The objective of the project is to understand the role of reactive oxygen species, a by-product of normal cellular metabolism, and NADPH oxidase in endothelial cell-cycle regulation, which is relevant to many cardiovascular complications.