Dr. Palei is currently working as an Assistant Professor (Grade-I) at Department of Chemistry, IIT Kharagpur. His area of research involves understanding the roles of the Post-Translational Modifications (PTMs) of histones in development and disease. His lab utilizes various chemical biology tools e.g. genetic code expansion, directed evolution, bacterial display, ribosomal display, bioorthogonal reactions to achieve the goals. Before joining IIT Kharagpur, he was a Senior Scientist at a Biotech Start-up company Athebio AG based in Zürich, Switzerland, where he developed high affinity DARPin binders for therapeutic applications using directed evolution with Ribosomal display platform. Previously, he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at TU Dortmund University, Germany and ETH Zürich, Switzerland funded by European Research Council (ERC) fellowship. During Postdoc he developed novel protein engineering and small molecule based tools to regulate functions of Epigenetic erasers (TETs), writers (DNMTs) and readers (MBDs) both in vitro and in vivo. He did his PhD in Chemical Biology at University of Münster with his work involving developing novel chemoenzymatic methods for making Semi-synthetic cyclic peptides and their selection using E. coli cell surface display. He has a MSc Chemistry degree from IIT Kanpur and Integrated B.Sc. B.Ed. (4 years) degree from RIE, Bhubaneswar (NCERT).