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Betty Raman

MBBS DPhil FESC FRACP


Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine

  • Wellcome Career Development Award Fellow
  • RDM Cardiovascular Medicine EDI Champion

I am an academic cardiologist and a senior clinical research fellow with a special interest in advanced cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) and its applications to inherited cardiovascular diseases.

I moved from Australia to Oxford in 2015, having completed my specialist clinical training in Cardiology (Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians) to undertake a DPhil in Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM), an inherited cardiac disease which is the number one cause of sudden death in young adults and athletes. During my DPhil, we discovered a novel oxygen-sensitive magnetic resonance approach, which showed tremendous potential in predicting risk in HCM patients and has the ability to detect myocardial deoxygenation/hypoxia in other diseases non-invasively (and without contrast). This work and other research of mine were recognised for their novelty and awarded a number of prestigious national and international prizes (ESC, AHA, BSCMR young investigator/early career awards, finalists at BCS and SCMR). For my post-doc, I was awarded a British Heart Foundation CRE Transition Intermediate Clinical Research Fellowship in 2020 to carry on my research. in HCM . At the peak of the pandemic, I also led efforts to better understand the medium to long term effects of COVID-19 on the health of patients using MRI, CPET and other validated measures of mental, physical and cognitive health in a large multicentre study (C-MORE study).

As part of my current research focus in HCM, I seek to identify early sensitive markers of disease activity for early- and late-stage clinical trials and for prognostic risk stratification. In 2024, I was awarded the highly prestigious Wellcome Career Development Award to discover and validate novel sensitive measures of disease activity in early stage HCM and to identify individuals at risk of disease progression and poor clinical outcomes. My research focusing on early-stage HCM using cutting-edge CMR measures, holds the potential to significantly improve the management of this disease. By precisely characterising patients at an unprecedented level of detail, I hope to proactively identify those poised for disease progression, thus enabling timely interventions with novel disease modifying and gene therapies. Dynamic endpoints that detect rapid response will not only minimise prolonged exposure to uncharted therapies but also pave the way for swift therapeutic assessments. My research is also expected to significantly accelerate the transition of drugs from phase II to phase III trials, fostering patient confidence and participation in these crucial studies.