Career Objectives

    Orient my research activities towards the excellence of science and hence contribute for the welfare of society. Being fortunate to have experience in the field of bio-organic chemistry, bio-physical characterization, all-atom molecular dynamics simulations, and molecular modeling tools, I would like to develop novel functional polypeptide as receptors, enzymes, nano-peptides and drugs to understand the structrure-conformation and conformation-function relationship in polypeptides and proteins. 

 

Education

        Postdoctoral Fellow (Biological and Organic Chemistry, UofT, Canada)       Sept. 2010 - Present

        Postdoctoral Fellow (Biomedical Engineering, WUSTL, USA)                       Dec. 2009 - Sept. 2010                                                

      Research Associate (Bio-organic Chemistry, IIT Bombay, India)                  Jan. 2009 - Nov. 2009

        Doctor of Philosophy ("Stereochemistry: Studies of its role in Protein Folding 

                                           and  scope in De novo design")                                       Jul. 2003 - Jan. 2009

                  Supervisor: Prof. Susheel Durani

               Bioorganic Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India

      Master of Science (Organic Chemistry)                                                               Jul. 2000 - Jul. 2002

                         University of Delhi, India

 

Scholastic Achievements

• Awarded CSIR-SRF in August 2005.
• Qualified CSIR-JRF Exam for Junior Research Fellowship in Chemical Science in June 2002.
   
• Awarded Travel Support from IBS-2007(National Symposium on Biophysics: Trends in Biomedical Research) to be held at New Delhi on Feburary 13-15, 2007.
• Awarded Grant from Dept. of Chemistry, IIT Bombay for attending Joint International Conference on Building Bridges, Forging Bonds for 21^st Century Organic Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Jointly organized by ACS and CSIR 2006. National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, India.
• Awarded Grant from Dept. of Chemistry, IIT Bombay for attending InCoB-2006 to be held at New Delhi, India on December 18-20, 2006.
• Awarded Grant from Dept. of Chemistry, IIT Bombay for attending IBS-2007 to be held at New Delhi, India on Feburary 13-15, 2007.
  

Research Interests

Molecular Biophysics, Chemical Biology, Drug Design and Discovery, Biochemistry, Medicinal Chemistry, Organic Chemistry

Research Experiences

• Protein Folding and Dynamics, De novo Protein Design and Engineering, Receptor Design and Engineering.
• Molecular Dynamics (MD) Simulations and Simulated Annealing Molecular Dynamics (SAMD) on peptides and proteins using GROMACS Software Package and Other Auxiliary Tools.
• Molecular Modeling of polypeptides and Proteins Using DTMM and In-house Software such as CAPM, PDBmake and Mutation. Extensive use of softwares like MOLMOL, MOLSCRIPT, Ribosome, RASMOL, WEBLAB Viewer, SWISS PDB, CHEM Draw, CHEM-3D for coordinate representation and visualization.
• Inverse Protein Sequence Design with Dead End Elimination (DEE), NACCESSfor Solvent Accessible Surface Area and Hydrophobic Entropy Calculations.
• Protein Structure Calculation with DYANA 1.5 and CYANA 2.1.
• Solid Phase Peptide Synthesis (SPPS): Synthesized a series of stereochemically diversified polypeptides (8mer-22mer), Capable of Carrying out Various Organic Reactions.
• Purification: Experience in purification of polypeptides by RP-HPLC.
• Characterization of small bio-molecules using different bio-physical techniques like UV-vis, Fluorescence, CD and MALDI-MS, 1D & 2D NMR.
• NMR Data Processing and Analysis with Felix (windows) and TOPSPIN.
• Electrostatic Calculation using DelPhi that uses Poisson Boltzmann equation.
• Theoretical and computational studies using Molecular Modeling and Molecular dynamics tools to understand mechanism and underlying principles of protein folding and Specificity.