Gaurav Kumar

I am Gaurav Kumar. I have completed my Ph.D from the Department of Physics from IIT-Bombay in July 2019. My PhD research has been based on biophysics of membranes remodeling. During my Ph.D, I have developed theoretical models to study membrane deformation due to the interaction between membrane and protein filaments. All my studies are based on elastic energy minimization of phospholipid membranes rendered with specific properties like intrinsic curvature and surface tension, due to the coating of the proteins. I have used an augmented form of Helfrich type free energy functional for all these cases. I have modelled membrane bound curved and chiral proteins as nematics bound to the vesicle surface.

After finishing my Ph.D, I have joined Dr. Anand Srivastava group as research associate. As my Ph.D. work based on membrane mechanics, It spurred my interest in developing multi-scale methods that could seamlessly bridge classical continuum field theories with molecular scale methods using the concepts that originate from rigorous statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.Currently, I am working on a problem of constructing a particle based coarse-grained molecular model of membrane-protein system (BAR domain family) using a combination of imaging data and continuum simulations data. I start with an augmented Helfrich-based continuum Hamiltonian model and arrive at the deformation profile observed in experimental images by optimizing the model parameters of multiple proteins and membrane interactions. In this reconstruction project, I have developed an algorithm that back maps the deformed continuum membrane to the corresponding coarse-grained particle based models. Currently I am working as SERB National Postdoctoral Fellow at Molecular Biophysics Unit, Indian Institute of Science-Bangalore.