Rate My Professor Raj Kumar

Dr. Rajiv Kumar is a medical oncologist and Senior Clinical Lecturer at the University of Otago, serving as an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Pathology within the Dunedin School of Medicine. He specializes in lung cancer and thoracic oncology, breast cancer, and melanoma, practicing across Christchurch and Dunedin. Kumar completed his MBChB and BMedSci degrees at the University of Otago in 2004. He pursued postgraduate training at Wellington and Auckland Hospitals, attaining Fellowship of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (FRACP) in 2012. He further honed his skills through clinical fellowships in Adelaide, Australia, and at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust in London, where he worked in the Phase 1 Drug Development Unit and the Lung Cancer Unit. In 2018, he was awarded a Doctor of Medicine (Research).

Kumar's research bridges clinical oncology and translational science, focusing on biomarker-driven approaches, immunotherapy in lung cancer, and mechanisms of resistance to EGFR inhibitors, with an emphasis on cancer epigenetics. As a co-investigator in the Chatterjee Laboratory at the University of Otago, he collaborates on innovative projects such as developing DNA methylation panels for liquid biopsies to enable early detection and real-time tracking of treatment responses in lung cancer patients. For this work, he and Associate Professor Aniruddha Chatterjee received the 2021 Roche Translational Cancer Research Fellowship. His contributions to the literature include co-authorship on 'Cell-free DNA methylation in the clinical management of lung cancer' (Trends in Molecular Medicine, 2024), 'Comparison of enzymatic and bisulfite-based methods for DNA methylation profiling' (2026), and 'Clinical cancer epigenetics' (2024). These efforts underscore his impact on advancing precision medicine in oncology.