Inderjit Singh, MBChB, (a medical degree awarded in the United Kingdom) is director of the Pulmonary Vascular Disease Program and specializes in treating pulmonary hypertension (high blood pressure in the heart-to-lung system).
Dr. Singh was steered toward medicine at an early age while growing up in Malaysia, where his father was a pediatrician. He often accompanied his father to work and says he enjoyed watching him help others feel better.
During medical school, he was drawn to pulmonary medicine, within which he discovered pulmonary vascular medicine—and pulmonary hypertension in particular.
“I have a strong interest in understanding the right heart and how it interacts with the pulmonary circulation,” Dr. Singh says. “And I like how pulmonary hypertension overlaps with so many specialties from cardiology to rheumatology to hepatology. You need to know all the different organs and disease processes to understand pulmonary hypertension.”
Pulmonary hypertension is also an exciting field because of many advancements in treatment, he says. “For a long time, we didn’t have much to offer in terms of therapy. But now there is more understanding of the disease, so much so that now you have dedicated training programs for pulmonary hypertension,” he says.
For research, Dr. Singh explores how the right ventricle of the heart and the pulmonary circulation interact, particularly during exercise.
“Our research is mainly focused on how the right heart interacts with the lungs’ blood vessels at rest and during exercise,” he explains. “We are one of the few centers in the world that performs invasive cardiopulmonary exercise test (iCPET). We primarily perform iCPET for patients who have unexplained shortness of breath or fatigue. So, these are patients who've had all the routine investigative testing, all of which do not explain their symptoms.”
