Rate My Professor Stuart Cook

Professor Stuart Cook is a clinician-scientist and cardiologist serving as Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School and Director of the Cardiovascular and Metabolic Disorders (CVMD) Programme. He also holds a professorship at Imperial College London. Cook grew up in Kenya and studied medicine at St Bartholomew’s Medical School in London. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry with First Class Honours, a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, a Doctor of Philosophy from the National Heart and Lung Institute in the United Kingdom, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He is a Member of the Royal College of Physicians and trained in cardiology with subspecialization in cardiac MRI.

Cook’s research focuses on the molecular genetics of cardiomyopathy and the role of interleukin-11 in fibrosis. His team identified truncating variants in the titin gene as a common cause of dilated cardiomyopathy and developed gene-based diagnostic tests now used in clinical practice. Key publications include a 2012 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine on titin truncations and a 2017 paper in Nature on IL-11 as a determinant of cardiovascular fibrosis. He has received the Tanoto Foundation Professorship in Cardiovascular Medicine and was inducted into the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2019. Cook co-founded Enleofen Bio, whose therapeutic platform targeting IL-11 was acquired by Boehringer Ingelheim. He serves as Director of the National Heart Research Institute Singapore.