Dr. Sajish Mathew
He graduated from the Department of Biological Sciences and Bio-Engineering (BSBE) at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) in 2009. His graduate work with Prof. Balaji Prakash, Ph.D. unraveled a novel enzymatic reaction and its mechanism of action in RelA/SpoT family of proteins. He went on to do his post-doctoral training with Prof. Paul Schimmel, Ph.D. at the Scripps Research, La Jolla, CA where he discovered that tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase (TyrRS) is a novel target of the natural compound resveratrol (RSV). His group at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, recently discovered that tyrosine amino acid is a potential causal agent that drives age-associated neuronal oxidative damage and depletes TyrRS in the brains of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) patients. Concomitantly, his group also established that only the cis-isomer of RSV (cis-RSV) is neuro- protective and paradoxically, the commonly used trans-RSV is neurotoxic, providing a molecular basis for the controversial outcomes of RSV in clinical trials. Currently, his group focuses on developing novel therapeutics against tyrosine-mediated neurocognitive and metabolic disorders.