Current (post-doctoral) Research

At Stanford, I am investigating the role of electrostatics on the enzyme catalyzed reactions at the Boxer Lab. Catalysis is a physical process relevant to innumerable natural and synthetic applications ranging from large scale commercial material synthesis to effective drug and vaccine design. Enzymes are natural catalysts that speed up reactions with remarkable selectivity, and in many cases provide astronomical rate accelerations. Understanding the physical origins of enzyme catalysis is therefore important. More on this soon !

I am also exploring the role of external electric fields on vibrational stretches of molecules with weak dipole moments. These oscillators can potentially serve as direct probes of local electrostatics in protein function.

PhD Research

Microfluidic based selection of RFPs based on Photo-physical Properties:

This project combined molecular biology, laser spectroscopy, some electronics, and some fluid engineering. I was using microfluidic screening assays to investigate the photophysical properties of various clones of Red Fluorescent Proteins created through directed evolution, with the ultimate goal of developing RFP clones with improved imaging properties. The project also included the creation of innovative laser and microfluidic systems for screening and sorting FP mutants. The project includes AutoCAD design and lithography in a clean room setting for microfluidic assay design, developing remote controlled setups utilizing NI-LabView, laser and optical bench optimization and setup, and methodologies in molecular biology. We accomplished this with the help of my colleague Professor Sheng Ting-Hung (then a postdoc at the Jimenez Lab)., we managed to develop a new DEP based microfluidic sorting system that can sort bacterial cells at high throughputs on photophysical selections of brightness and lifetime allowing us to probe millions of mutants in a matter of few hours.

Physical basis of RFP photo-physics - trying to comprehend RFP dynamics in-vitro and in-vivo

The aforementioned effort also investigated the structure and dynamics of the chromophore region of FPs, as well as the effect of mutations that cause changes in the chromophore's immediate environment. The project is based on the rational design of such FP mutants and the exploration of the photophysics of such systems using time-resolved and steady-state spectroscopic methods, as well as extensive simulation studies provided by computational tools such as NAMD, Gaussian, PyMol, Rosetta, Python, and MATLAB.

Dark state conversion - The intrinsic blinking of FPs

FPs are known to blink stochastically over a wide temporal range. I was interested in using the blinking of these proteins in super-resolution imaging techniques such as STORM or SOFI. I worked on simulating the kinetics of blinking in FPs, as well as single-molecule TIRF imaging to develop new probes for SR-imaging by creating large libraries of mutants that can be screened and sorted for superior blinking properties using multi-harmonic frequency domain fluorescence spectroscopy.

Undergraduate Research

My undergraduate research concentrated on two broad spectroscopic approaches. I was working on lanthanide fluorescence and low temperature matrix isolated infrared spectroscopy of the anesthetic propofol with Professor (ret.) K.S. Viswanathan. I also interned with Professor Horst Koeppel (University of Heidelberg) on theoretical chemistry, Late Professor Kankan Bhattacharya (IACS, Kolkata) on fluorescence imaging, Dr. Suresh Gokhale at NCL Pune on carbon nanotechnology, and Professor Santanu Pal on liquid crystals during my summer breaks at college.