Rate My Professor Arunasalam Dharmarajan

Professor Arunasalam Dharmarajan serves as Adjunct Professor in the Curtin School of Diagnostic and Therapeutic Sciences within the Faculty of Health Sciences at Curtin University, Perth, Australia. Previously, he held the position of Professor (Full) in the School of Biomedical Sciences, affiliated with the Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute (CHIRI), from July 2012. His academic journey began with a B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Madras, India, followed by an M.Med.Sc. from Sri Lanka and a PhD in Reproductive Endocrinology from the University of Western Australia in 1985. He also holds an honorary MD in Physiology. After his doctorate, Dharmarajan completed postdoctoral training at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, USA, where he subsequently held faculty positions. He joined the University of Western Australia in 1995 and was promoted to Professor in 2001. Over the past two decades at institutions including UWA and Curtin, he has spent significant time in the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology.

Professor Dharmarajan has conducted pioneering research on apoptosis, or physiological cell death, and cell signaling mechanisms in endocrine organs. His expertise encompasses the Wnt signaling pathway, particularly the antagonist secreted frizzled-related protein 4 (sFRP4) and its implications in cancer biology, cancer stem cells in ovarian, breast, and glioblastoma tumors, epithelial-mesenchymal transition, autophagy, mesenchymal stem cells, cancer metabolism, epigenetics, nanotechnology, and models for neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and spinal cord injury. With over 250 publications and more than 8,251 citations, his influential works include 'Regulation of pleiotropic physiological roles of nitric oxide' (2023), 'TIPE Family of Proteins and Its Implications in Different Pathological Conditions' (2018), 'A novel benzimidazole derivative, MBIC inhibits tumor angiogenesis' (2017), 'Predominant factors influencing reactive oxygen species in cancer stem cells' (2023), and 'Unravelling the Road to Recovery: Mechanisms of Wnt Signalling in Spinal Cord Injury' (2024). He received the Curtin Innovation Award (Health Sciences Prize) in 2016 and a Raine Priming Grant in 1996. Dharmarajan has supervised numerous PhD, M.Sc., and Honours students, serves on editorial boards of international journals, reviews manuscripts for over 50 journals, and contributes to scientific committees, including the National Scientific Committee for the 50th EMBO workshop on Wnt Signalling.