ALBERTA • Division of Cardiology January 27th 2015 The Origins Project Postdoctoral Prize Lectureship Arizona State University Re: Reference for Gopinath Sutendra, Ludwig Cancer Institute, University of Oxford. Dear Committee Members, I would like to offer my strongest possible support for Gopinath Sutendra for the Origins Project Postdoctoral Prize Lectureship competition at Arizona State University in the disciplines of Biological Sciences and Medicine. Over the past 17 years I have supervised many students that have received prestigious international awards, including several that have won the Cournard-Comroe Young investigator Award of the American Heart Association. Among those, Gopinath ranks in the top and I can comfortably say that he is the brightest and the most innovative and hard working student I have ever been associated with. Gopinath completed his PhD degree with me at the University of Alberta in June of 2012 and his thesis impressed me, as well as all the members of the defense committee. The external examiner was Dr. Marlene Rabinovitch, a senior professor of Pediatrics from Stanford University and perhaps one of the top 5 scientists in the history of pulmonary vascular biology. She has supervised myriads of students and her impressively positive comments on Gopinath's thesis were very important for both him and myself. Gopinath's thesis reflected his dedication, hard work as well as his innovative thinking that he has demonstrated continuously during his first steps in his academic career. It was not a surprise that, with Dr Rabinovitch's support, Gopinath's thesis was judged to be the best for the whole University of Alberta that year, not just the Medical School. Overall his work is characterized by in-depth studies that include multiple techniques and several models, are mechanistic and explore fundamental mechanisms at multiple levels and in a highly translational manner, since they aim to answer important questions re