Guha Lab
In Memoriam - Dr. Abhijit Guha 1957-2011
It is with great sadness that I inform you that Dr. Abhijit (Ab) Guha passed away peacefully in the early morning hours on November 8th, 2011. For the past three years, Ab has been courageously fighting his diagnosis of acute myelocytic leukemia (AML). He was 54 years old.
Ab graduated with a degree in medicine from the University of Toronto in 1982. He then entered the neurosurgery residency training program at the University of Toronto under Dr. Alan Hudson. In 1985, he received a masters degree from the Institute of Medical Sciences under the tutelage of Dr. Charles Tator. He completed his neurosurgical residency training in 1989, and passed his Royal College specialty examination in neurosurgery that same year. Ab then traveled to Boston with his family to work as post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Charles Stiles at Harvard where he began his career-long interest in neuro-oncology research.
After his research fellowship at Harvard, Ab returned to the University of Toronto in 1993 to begin his faculty appointment as an assistant professor, and to conduct research in signal transduction mechanisms under the supervision of Dr. Tony Pawson at the Lunenfeld Research Institute.
Ab was promoted to Associate Professor in 1997, and to full Professor in 2001. In 1997, he received the Gold Medal Award from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. In 1998, he was the recipient of the George Armstrong Peters Prize in the Department of Surgery. In 2000, he was appointed as the co-director of the Arthur and Sonia Labatt Brain Tumour Research Centre (BTRC). In 2001, he was given the Farber Award for excellence in neuro-oncology research by the Society of Neuro-Oncology (SNO) and the AANS/CNS. In 2002, he was installed as the inaugural Alan and Susan Hudson Chair in Neuro-Oncology at the University Health Network. In 2005, he received the Humanitarian Award from the Indo-Canadian Chamber of Commerce. That same year, he began a two-year term as president of the Society of Neuro-Oncology. In 2009, he was awarded the Lister Prize in the Department of Surgery at the University of Toronto.
Ab served on numerous editorial boards, grants panels, and boards of private philanthropic foundations. His research focus was on the molecular biology of human brain tumours, in particular, human astrocytoma. For this tumour, he developed some of the most promising model systems, and discovered new genes that are associated with astrocytoma formation. His lab has been well funded over many years by numerous peer-reviewed granting agencies. He published his work in top tier neuro-oncology journals. He was an invited speaker around the world for his outstanding research work in human brain tumours.
Born in Kolkata, India, Ab devoted himself in recent years to the establishment of a neuroscience institute in Kolkata where he frequently travelled to teach, operate on patients with neurosurgical diseases, and educate the faculty there about research.
Ab was married to Soma, and had two children, Daipayan (Deep) a medical student at the University of Toronto, and Tia, an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto. The Labatt Brain Tumour Research Centre extends its most sincere and heartfelt condolences to the Guha family at this difficult time.
James T. Rutka, MD, PhD, FRCSC