Dr Sutapa Mukherjee

Dr Sutapa Mukherjee

Associate Editor: Sutapa Mukherjee

Dr Mukherjee is Associate Professor at Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health, Flinders University based in Adelaide, South Australia. She is an internationally recognized authority on the epidemiology of sleep disordered breathing and the genetic epidemiology of obstructive sleep apnea. She is an expert clinician in sleep medicine and sleep health. Dr Mukherjee has had a unique research career in that the initial focus of her research as part of her PhD was lung malignancy (lung cancer and malignant mesothelioma), with an emphasis on novel treatment modalities such as gene therapy and immunotherapy in animal models and humans. Subsequently she pursued postdoctoral work in clinical and occupational epidemiology whilst working at Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA from 1999-2003 and coordinated studies of occupationally exposed workers. She returned to Perth, Australia in 2003 and initiated and developed the WA Sleep Health Study - a clinical case series of over 5,000 patients with sleep apnea. This cohort has led to key collaborations and publications, and a follow-up of the cohort was funded in 2017 by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC Australia). She was also an investigator for the Sleep Apnea and cardioVascular Endpoints (SAVE) trial, a landmark randomized clinical trial of CPAP therapy in moderate to severe sleep apnoea.

In 2011, she was appointed to the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor of Medicine and she continued her research on the WA Sleep Health Study and developed and led the International Sleep Genetic Epidemiology Consortium, a platform to investigate the genetics of sleep apnea which currently involves several groups of researchers internationally. As Clinical Lead of the Ontario Health Study she also had a leadership role in developing and supervising this major international cohort study of over 230,000 participants. She has a keen interest in Sleep Health and in 2014 was invited to Chair the American Thoracic Society (ATS) committee on Healthy Sleep at the invitation of the ATS Board, which culminated in the publication of an Official ATS Statement “The Importance of Healthy Sleep”.
In 2014 she relocated to Adelaide, Australia and continues her research work into epidemiology and genetics of sleep apnea. She serves on the Board of the Australasian Sleep Association as Clinical Committee Chair and is on the Program Committee of the ATS Sleep and Respiratory Neurobiology Assembly and the Membership and International Scientific Committees for the World Sleep Society.