Dr. Kamlesh Kumar Yadav is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Engineering Medicine (EnMed), Texas A&M University, Texas, USA, which offers MD and Master of Engineering (ME) dual degrees in 4 years. All the medical students, referred to as physicianeers, have a background in engineering and are expected to pioneer a medical device/technology as a requisite for the ME degree. He joined the institute since its inception in 2019 as a co-director of the foundational course that covers biochemistry, cell & molecular biology, genetics & genomics, and pharmacology. He is also the co-director of the flipped classroom methodology that delivers engineering-blended medical curriculum through Team Based Learning (TBL) modules. For the organ blocks he covers the sections on oncology, lectures on AI in Oncology, and is the campus lead for the Evidence based medicine course. Dr. Yadav is also the co-chair of the pre-clerkship committee of the School of Medicine at Texas A&M that oversees the approval of all the pre-clerkship courses for the school of medicine. He has been certified in the fundamentals of TBLs by the Team Based Learning Collaborative and has completed the Program for Educators in Health Professions offered by the Harvard Macy Institute, Boston, Massachusetts. As an expert and leader of TBLs, he has set up several workshops on the flipped pedagogy and has been on discussion panels on incorporating newer technologies, such as generative AI in medical education.
As an active researcher, Dr. Yadav has more than 30 publications that include patents, book chapters, and research papers, some of which have been published in high profile journals such as Cell, Nature Genetics, PNAS, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, eLife, and Cancer Research. He has expertise in translational, clinical and data-sciences research, and has published actively in those areas. Throughout his academic career, Dr. Yadav has received multiple awards and research grants, which include agencies such as the Central Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), New York University Graduate School, US Department of Defense (DoD), Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF), American Urologic Association (AUA), and the Texas A&M University.
Background: Dr. Yadav did his early schooling in India. He did his first Masters (Biochemistry) from Banaras Hindu University, Uttar Pradesh, and a second one from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, where he conducted a blended engineering and biology project that earned him his first first-author paper. Dr. Yadav completed his PhD from New York University School of Medicine, where he carried out seminal studies in the field of cellular signaling. He was one of the first in the field to develop large-molecule inhibitors to inactivate the RAS oncogene. During his postdoctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, Dr. Yadav conducted studies that focused on the genomics of prostate cancer. In 2014, he joined Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York as Assistant Professor and was engaged in medical education as well as conducting translation research in prostate cancer. He received the LeFrak Family PCF Young Investigator Award to study mechanisms of drug resistance in prostate cancer. Before moving to EnMed, Dr. Yadav worked as Principal Scientist for a big-data, personalized medicine company Sema4 Genomics.
