The Department of Surgery is pleased to welcome Ayanabha Chakraborti, M.S., Ph.D. (left), to the Division of Gastrointestinal Surgery as an instructor as well as Bassam Shukrallah, M.D. (right), to the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery as an assistant professor.
Chakraborti also serves as the managing director of the UAB Behavioral Assessment Core. He received his Ph.D. in pharmacology from University of Delhi, India and subsequently obtained postdoctoral training at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Department of Neurosurgery, University of California, San Francisco.
Chakraborti also received advanced training in space radiation biology research at NASA. He previously worked as a senior lecturer at the Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine, Monash University in Malaysia and as an assistant consultant at the Innovation Labs, Tata Consultancy Services in India.
Chakraborti, who currently works in the Bibb Lab, has research interests centered around understanding the mechanisms by which stress and gastrointestinal inflammation affect behavioral and brain function.
Shukrallah completed his residency at the University of South Alabama Department of Surgery. He then completed advanced fellowship training in cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Minnesota Medical Center in Minneapolis, MN.
Before joining UAB, Shukrallah served as a cardiothoracic surgeon in the Section of Cardiac Surgery at Minneapolis Heart Institute for over three years. Before that, he was an assistant professor of cardiothoracic surgery in The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center Department of Cardiac Surgery, where he also served as surgical director of the ECMO Program.
Shukrallah earned his bachelor of science from the University of Houston and his medical degree from St. Matthews University School of Medicine in the Cayman Islands, British West Indies. Following medical school, Shukrallah served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Infectious Diseases at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Before completing his residency at the University of South Alabama, he served as a resident and research resident at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Shukrallah has undergone additional training in organ care for heart and lung preservation as well as cardiovascular devices for patient care. He has served as a site principal investigator and co-investigator on numerous research grants. He is a member of the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation, The Society of Thoracic Surgeons, and Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO).