About
Dr. Perera is director of the Center for RNA Biology at Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, a senior scientist in the Cancer & Blood Disorders Institute and an associate professor of oncology in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He also has a secondary affiliation with the Johns Hopkins All Children’s Institute for Fundamental Biomedical Research. He uses biology, analytic genomics and bioinformatics to seek patterns that can lead to treatments for aggressive cancers. Dr. Perera’s research focuses on genes and identifying those susceptible to changes that lead to disease. He seeks to identify these changes early in life, which would allow early intervention through surgery or therapies that could prevent or alter the course of the disease.
Dr. Perera worked for several biotech and pharmaceutical companies before joining the faculty at Mercer University’s School of Medicine as an associate professor and director of genomics and research and development at Anderson Cancer Institute at Memorial Health Medical Center. He then worked for the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Research Institute before joining Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in 2018. He is also an adjunct faculty in the NCI-designated Cancer Center at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
Education
- M.S., Cytogenetics, Peoples Friendship University Moscow, 1984
- Ph.D., Molecular Genetics, Moscow University, and DNA Repair and Recombination, University of Gent, Belgium, Adviser: Professor Marc Van Montagu, Ph.D., 1987
- Post-doctoral fellowship, Gene Targeting and DNA Recombination, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Adviser: Professor Ethan R. Signer, Ph.D., 1994
Department and Institute Affiliations
- Department of Oncology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
- Cancer & Blood Disorders Institute, Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital
- Institute for Fundamental Biomedical Research, Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital
- The Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center
Honors and Awards
- Honorary Professor, Institute of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, University of Colombo, 1999
- European Economic Community Biotechnology and Genetic engineering scholarship for post graduate studies, 1987
