Aneel Bhangu is Professor of Surgery at the University of Birmingham and a consultant colorectal surgeon at University Hospitals Birmingham. He trained in medicine at Birmingham and completed his PhD at Imperial College London, and directs the university's Surgical Data and Policy Lab.

He leads large, data-driven surgical research and trials, and was a founding member of the GlobalSurg Collaborative and the NIHR Global Health Research Unit on Global Surgery. He also co-led the CovidSurg Collaborative, the global surgical research response to the pandemic. In 2026 he became co-chief investigator of STRIDE-RCT, an NHS trial testing whether multi-cancer blood tests can help GPs spot abdominal cancers earlier.