Jagdeep Nanchahal is the Professor of Hand, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, University of Oxford. The Institute is dedicated to research in musculoskeletal disorders and is pre-eminent in the world for translational research, which entails developing treatments in the laboratory and translating them to direct patient care. Amongst their greatest achievements is the development of anti-TNF-a treatment for patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Professor Nanchahal attended medical school in London, completing an intercalated PhD in 1982. Following graduation from medical school in 1985, he undertook his early surgical training in London. He went on to complete his plastic surgery training in the UK before undertaking fellowships in hand and microsurgery in Australia and the USA. In 1996 he was appointed as senior lecturer in plastic and reconstructive surgery at Imperial College, London and in 2002 as associate professor at University of Sydney, before returning to a chair Imperial College, London in 2006. He transferred to the University of Oxford in 2011.

His clinical interests relate mainly to surgery of the upper and lower limb. He has been trained to the highest levels in treating disorders of the hand, with specialist interests in patients with nerve injury or compression, tendon disorders, Dupuytren’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis. He has a particular interest in microsurgical reconstruction. Together with Michael Pearse, consultant orthopaedic surgeon based at the Charing Cross Hospital, Professor Nanchahal has built up a truly combined plastic and orthopaedic surgery service dedicated to the treatment of patients with lower limb injuries. He led the group which wrote the Standards for the Management of Open Lower Limb Fractures on behalf of the British Orthopaedic and Plastic Surgery Associations (http://www.bapras.org.uk/page.asp?id=724).

He is a member of several learned societies, including the British and Australian Societies for Hand Surgery and the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons.

His academic background combined with his surgical training has allowed Professor Nanchahal to pursue basic scientific research with direct application to patient care. He was involved in the development of cultured composite skin grafts and, more recently, in determining the mechanisms of tendon and bone invasion and destruction in rheumatoid arthritis. His current interests centre on the developing therapies for accelerating fracture healing and the mechanisms involved in the pathogenesis of Dupuytren’s disease. His most recent findings demonstrate a novel way of accelerating fracture healing using cytokines. The research activities have won numerous national and international awards, including the AO UK trauma prize as well as the prize for best paper for two consecutive years at the Australian Hand Surgery Society Meeting and the Hueston award. He has published 70 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including the Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA and the British Medical Journal, as well as the major hand and plastic surgery journals. He has been an invited lecturer on more than 100 occasions. He is committed to the development of academic surgery and has supervised several surgical trainees through periods of research, leading to the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.