Anant Chopra

Anant Chopra is an associate director and senior research scientist II in the Bayer-Broad cardiovascular precision medicine group. He’s interested in uncovering novel mechanisms that drive cardiac disease progression, with the ultimate goal to discover biological targets for drug discovery and therapy. To enable the finding of novel targets, he’s focusing his efforts on developing state-of-the-art functional and imaging-based in vitro screening platforms using engineered human stem cell derived heart cells and tissues. 

Prior to joining Bayer, Chopra worked in various laboratories. He earned his Ph.D. at Drexel University in the cardiovascular biophysics research laboratory under the guidance of J.Yasha Kresh and Paul Janmey (University of Pennsylvania), developing assays to understand how the cardiomyocyte cytoskeleton adapts to extracellular cues (e.g., cell-cell contact and cell-ECM). He then moved to Boston to work as an AHA postdoctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and at the Biological Design Center at Boston University. He worked under the guidance of Christopher Chen in the Tissue Microfabrication Laboratory where he developed biomimetic heart tissue models and live imaging assays to delve into mechanisms of genetic cardiomyopathies.