Dr. Shantikumar Nair

Director & Professor

Regarded as one of India's foremost scientists, Dr. Shantikumar Nair is not only Dean of Research, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, he also heads Amrita's most successful research center in nano-bio.

The Amrita Center for Nanosciences was started five years ago with funding from India's Nano Mission. In a short amount of time, it emerged as the country's foremost such research center and started becoming recognized world-wide for pioneering research in tissue engineering and stem cells.

Today, the center is also spearheading research in nano solar. In September of last year, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy awarded a multi-crore rupees grant to the center to develop nanomaterials-based solar photo voltaic cells.

The progress of this work was reviewed in February this year by a visiting fifteen-member team of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Energy. The fifteen Members of Parliament were so impressed with the path-breaking work accomplished within a short amount of time, that they invited Dr. Shanti to Delhi, to make a complete presentation to all members of the Standing Committee.

Also in February this year, Dr. Shanti was chosen to receive the prestigious National Research Award from the Ministry of Science and Technology. This award given to one scientist in India every year was bestowed upon him for his spectacular contributions to the emerging field of nanosciences and nanotechnology.

This award was only the latest in a long string of awards and achievements Dr. Shanti has had in his illustrious career. Prior to joining Amrita, he was a tenured professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA, for nearly two decades.

In 1986, he received the prestigious Presidential Young Investigator Award for research in composite materials from the President of the United States.

Dr. Shanti has several books and over a hundred publications in international journals to his credit. A former IIT Bombay graduate in Metallurgical Engineering, he received his PhD at Columbia University in the city of New York in 1983.

Dr. Ganesan T. S

Professor

Dr Ganesan was educated at JIPMER, Pondicherry India for his MBBS. MD and accredited in medical oncology by the Royal College of Physicians followed by Ph.D from University of London, UK. He then went on to become a Consultant at the Churchill Hospital (1990-2005) at Oxford. He also set up an independent laboratory at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (1990-2006). He was also a Reader/ Professor at the University of Oxford. On his return to India he took up the current position of Chairman of the Cancer institute at AIMS.

Dr. Ganesan’s research is in two areas: The first area of research is the study of cancer stem cells which is a relatively new hypothesis as to how cancer develops - both haematological as well as in solid tumours. The aim is to understand and characterize this cancer stem cells in a range of solid tumours and haematological malignancies and study their properties. In the first instance to isolate cancer stem cells from ovarian cancer, testicular cancer, breast cancer and study their properties. This is done by a combination of approaches, including micro-array, genetic analysis and biochemistry.

The second area of research is to try and understand signaling pathways, which are commonly affected in cancer. These include both the MAP kinase pathway and the PI3 kinase pathway. Usually, cells are stimulated by signaling through receptors which are on the surface of the cells. These are increased in expression or amplified at the gene level in cancer. This has led to the discovery of specific small molecule inhibitors which target type I receptor tyrosine kinases and type III receptor tyrosine kinases. Dr. Ganesan's team studies signaling mechanisms of these receptor tyrosine kinases by using small molecular inhibitors which are in the clinic adopting a combined approach of 1D/ 2D gels and mass spectrometry.

Dr. Jayakumar Rangasamy

Professor

Dr. Jayakumar Rangasamy (Professor) - Professor at ACNS specializing in the area of Biopolymeric Nanomaterials. Dr. R. Jayakumar joined ACNS during November-2007. He received his Ph.D. in Polymer Chemistry from the Anna University, Chennai, India (2002). He has both B. Sc & B. Ed in Chemistry from University of Madras (1993) and an M. Sc. in Chemistry from Bharathidasan University (1995), and has over 110 Journal publications (both research & review articles), 7 book chapter and patents to his credit. His publications have been cited more than 1400 times. In addition, he has also edited and published 4 books. Among the 4 books 2 of the Book Series in was edited and published Advances in Polymer Science (Springer-SCI Impact Factor-4.6).

Dr. Jayakumar's research laboratory at Amrita Center for Nanosciences and Molecular Medicine is mainly interested in the development of biodegradable polymeric nanofibers, nanogels, nanoparticles, nanocomposite scaffolds and membranes for tissue engineering (Bone, Periodontal and Skin), Cancer drug delivery, targeting, imaging and wound dressing applications. Dr. Jayakumar has been consistently recognized for his academic excellence and research. As a postgraduate, he ranked third in the M. Sc from Bharathidasan University. He was awarded a Senior Research fellowship from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). Later he was awarded the University Postdoctoral Fellowship from Chonbuk National University (2002-2003), South Korea. In Portugal, he was awarded FCT Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Government of Portugal (2003-2005). In addition, he was also awarded the prestigious JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship (2005-2007) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Japan. He also received "Young Investigator Fellowship-2008" from Department of Science and Technology (DST), India. He is also reviewer and editorial board member of many international journals.

Dr. Manzoor K.

Professor

Dr. Manzoor K is a Professor at ACNS specializing in the area of cancer nanomedicine, nanotoxicology and molecular finger-printing of cancer bio-markers. Dr. Manzoor K joined ACNS in June 2007. Prior to his current position, he served as Staff-Scientist at Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO), Ministry of Defence, Govt. of India for about 10 years where he had extensive research experience in the design and development of functional nanosystems for defence applications. The Govt. of India has shown appreciation for his valuable contributions to the area of nanotechnology by conferring prestigious awards such as DRDO Technology Developer of the Year 2006, National Science Day Award-2005, DRDO Young Scientist of the Year 2004, and Best Laboratory Scientist of the Year 2003.

Currently, his team at ACNS focus on: targeted multifunctional nanomedicines for the diagnostic and therapy of drug resistant cancer and cancer stem cells using bio-friendly luminescent quantumdots, magnetic nanocrystals, nano-biomaterials showing x-ray, MR and near-infrared contrast, nanoscintillator quantumdots based x-ray dynamic therapy, plasmonic nanocrystals based RF hyperthermia, nano-siRNA conjugates based genes silencing and Raman spectroscopic finger printing of Onco-genes.

In 2008, Dr Manzoor K received the prestigious Marie-Curie IIF Award from European Commission to work with Erasmus Medical University, the Netherlands, for developing `Peptide targeted nanophotomedicines for molecular imaging guided laser therapy of cancer' (Patent pending). He has written about 34 international publications and [05 patents (02 issued and 03 submitted).] He is a member of the European Society of Nanomedicine, the European Foundation of Clinical Nanomedicine and the American Association of Nanomedicine.

Dr. Deepthy Menon

Associate Professor

Dr. Deepthy Menon joined Amrita Center for Nanosciences in June 2006 as Assistant Professor. She has a doctorate degree in Physics from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and a few years of post-doctoral experience at the International School of Photonics, Cochin University of Science and Technology as well as at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. She has been working on nanomaterials for photonic applications during her postdoctoral period.

She is the 2002 recipient of the Best Thesis Award constituted by the Indian Laser Association. She has received several additional recognitions in her research career, including the Young Research Award from International Union of Materials Research Societies (1999), Young Scientist Fellowship from Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India 2002, and Rapid Young Investigator Grant from Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India 2007.

Her current research is in the field of cancer nanomedicine, primarily focused on the design and development of targeted multifunctional nanomedicines for cancer diagnosis and therapy based on biocompatible fluorescent quantum dots and biodegradable polymers, nanophytomedicines for cancer therapy, plasmonic nanocrystals for photothermal therapy, and biodegradable polymeric nanomaterials for drug delivery as well as polymeric nanofibrous scaffolds for tissue engineering applications.

She is a member of Indian Laser Association, Photonics Society of India and Materials Research Society. She has to her credit 30 publications in peer-reviewed international journals and also serves as the reviewer for several international journals.

Dr. C. Gopi Mohan

Associate Professor

Dr. C. Gopi Mohan is Associate Professor at Amrita Centre for Nanosciences and Molecular Medicine. He received his Ph.D. degree from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. He worked for about two years as Post-doctoral fellow in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, followed by Research Officer in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, United Kingdom. Further, he worked as Associate Researcher in Laboratoire de Cristallographie et Modélisation des Matériaux Minéraux et Biologiques, CNRS, Faculté de Sciences Bd des Aiguillettes, Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy, France. During his research carrier he visited different countries which include: UK, Canada, France and Finland..

He joined as a faculty member of National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education & Research (NIPER), Mohali, Punjab from 2005 and served there for six and half years. During his stay at NIPER he was instrumental in setting up different laboratories of Pharmacoinformatics discipline in which MS (Pharm) course and Ph.D. degree was ongoing. He had been recipient of Indo-Finland grant for computational biology related to drug development and visited University of Helsinki and University of Turku to complete successfully this collaborative bilateral program.

He has taught different courses at NIPER, both at postgraduate and doctoral level. He has also supervised about 23 postgraduate theses. He along with his students and other colleagues has authored about 43 research papers and three review articles. He was reviewer of different international/national research journals, thesis and grants etc. The research area of Gopi Mohan spans over Computational Biology and Structural Bioinformatics, Structure-Based Drug Design and Protein crystallography. He was also cited as international well known expert in the field of Structural Bioinformatics and Chemoinformatics by Synergix Ltd. United Kingdom, which was founded in 1996 by Dr. N.C. Cohen, a pioneer of rational drug design.

Dr. Krishnakumar Menon

Associate Professor

Dr. Menon took his M.Sc. in Biochemistry from M.S. University of Baroda, India and an M.Sc (Prelim, Monash)/ Ph.D on a scholarship from National Multiple Sclerosis Society of Australia equivalent to commonwealth research grant from La Trobe University, Australia. He then went on to do his post-doctoral training on a JSPS fellowship at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Japan and the University of Connecticut Health Center, USA. Subsequently, he was a staff scientist at the University of Iowa, USA and Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories at Monash University, Australia before joining as a faculty at AIMS.  He is also a reviewer of grants and Ph.D thesis from overseas.  In addition, Dr. Menon was an invited scientist to National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Japan.  Some of his publications are cited extensively in the field of myelin biology.

Dr. Menon's interest is focused on diseases affecting the central nervous system and the role of myelin-axolemmal complexes in signaling between myelin and the axons in the context of myelin-axon maintenance and neurodegnerative diseases.

Dr. Avinash Balakrishnan

Assistant Professor

Dr. Avinash Balakrishnan joined as faculty at Nanosolar Division in 2010, following a post doctorate at Grenoble Institute of Technology (Grenoble-INP) France. He did his PhD and M.S in Materials Engineering from Paichai University, S.Korea. He is an alumnus of National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, where he completed his Bachelors in Metallurgical Engineering. Dr. Balakrishnan has received several prestigious fellowships and travel grants through out his academic career that includes KOSEF fellowship to pursue his masters (2003), Korea Research Foundation Fellowship to pursue his PhD (2005) and CEFIPRA postdoctoral fellowship (2008). His past professional experience also includes being research scientist at Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS), South Korea where he extensively worked on high temperature and high strength ceramic materials for space, armour and dental applications. During his post-doctoral research, he mainly focused on simulations and mechanics related to ceramic nanoparticles.

His current research interest includes developing nano-structured ceramic-based oxides as electrode materials for energy storage devices. The concepts being investigated are growth behavior, morphological effect on charge-discharge mechanism, effect of secondary particle phase in electrode etc. He is also actively collaborating with other faculty members on projects related to photovoltaic cells carried out at Nanosolar division. He has co-authored over 40 research publications in reputed international journals of the like Acta Materialia, Journal of American Ceramic Society, Journal of Materials Research, etc. He also peer reviews international journals. He is currently a life member of The Materials Research Society of India and Solar Energy Society of India.

Dr. Bindhu Paul

Assistant Professor

Dr. Bindhu Paul Joined Amrita Centre for Nanosciences and Molecular Medicine as Assistant Professor from January, 2011. She took M.Sc. in Zoology with specialization in Molecular and Cytogenetics from Banaras Hindu University, India and Ph.D. in Marine Genetics from Cochin University of Science and Technology. She pursued post-doctoral research in Japan at the National Institute for Basic Biology, which comes under National Institute of Natural Sciences.

She has spent 8 years in Japan doing research in the area of reproductive physiology/endocrinology/developmental biology/toxicology. She has 14 international publications to her credit. Her research focused on vertebrate sex determination and differentiation and how exposure to endocrine disruptors/synthetic hormones affects gonadal development in the Japanese medaka, which is widely used as a model organism for biomedical research. In Amrita, she will focus on studies involving in vivo toxicity of the nanomedicines especially during early gonadal development.

She is also interested in studying whether there is development of ovarian follicles from pre-existing female germline stem cells in the differentiated ovaries and the endocrine regulation of these cells. She is setting up an endocrinology laboratory where in various issues related to defective endocrine signalling (including cancer) and the mechanisms involved will be studied

Dr. Krishna Prasad

Associate Professor

Dr. Krishna Prasad joined Amrita in September 2008 after gaining post-doctoral research experience from Stanford University Medical School in California, USA. Dr. Prasad completed his PhD in 2006 at the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology. Through out the five years of his doctoral studies, Dr. Prasad was supported by an institute fellowship, having qualified for it after obtaining first rank. A rank-holder throughout his academic career, he also obtained the second rank in the entire university when completing his MSc in Medical Biochemitry at the Mahatma Gandhi University.
 
His areas of interest include the possible uses of bio mimetic materials in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, synthesis of nano-scale scaffolds with novel assembly properties to influence stem cell differentiation, development of a bioreactor system for various tissue engineering applications, promotion of angiogenesis and vascular remodeling in tissue engineered scaffolds etc. Current projects include Tissue engineering for Bone and cartilage regeneration, Myocardial Regeneration, Liver tissue engineering, and Stem cell differentiation for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative medicine.

He has over 50 Journal publications (both research & review articles), 3 book chapter and 6 patents to his credit. Recently he has received the prestigious MAHE Award from the Society or Biomaterials and Artificial Organs, India.  

He is a member of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS), Society or Biomaterials and Artificial Organs – India (SBAOI) and also serves as the reviewer for several international journals.

Dr. Lakshmi Sumitra

Research Scientist

Dr. Lakshmi Sumitra Joined Amrita recently in 2011. She did her post graduation in Biotechnology and went on to do her PhD at Paichai University, South Korea with scholarship from Korean Research Foundation.

Her main area of research was Virology and Plant Pathology. She went on to do Post Doctoral research in structural biology Lab of Dr Imre Berger, EMBL, Grenoble. She was involved in development of a new vector system for expression of recombinant proteins in Insect cells using Baculoviruses.

She will be establishing a Eukaryotic Expression Facility here at the ACNMS and will be investigating practical applications of this new technology for vaccine development, biocontrol products etc

Dr. Raja Biswas

Assistant Professor

Dr. Biswas joined Amrita in June 2009. He has completed his PhD and post doctoral work in the field of Microbial Genetics and Infectious Diseases from the Department of Microbial Genetics, University of Tuebingen, Germany.

He is the recipient of Ramalingaswami fellowship, Rapid Grant for Young Scientists from Department of Biotechnology in 2009 and Fast track grant for young scientists from Department of science and technology in 2010. He has to his credit nearly 16 publications in reputed journals like Molecular Microbiology, Journal of Bacteriology, Infection & Immunity and Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Dr. Biswas's research is focused on understanding more about the mechanism of infectious diseases specifically in understanding the complex network of host-microbe interactions, pathogenic mechanisms to escape the surveillance of host immune system and mechanisms for drug resistance.

Dr. Sivakumar Nagarajan

Assistant Professor

Dr. Sivakumar Nagarajan joined as a faculty at Nanosolar Division in August, 2011. He received his Ph.D. in Physics- Materials Science from University of Madras. His doctoral dissertation focused on the electrical and magnetic studies on nanostructured spinel ferrites. He also worked for a period as a postdoctoral training at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (FZK), Germany, where he was involved in mechanical studies on lithium ion batteries using laser beam deflection method.

He sustained his post-doctoral research at Chonnam National University and Kookmin University, South Korea where he focused on synthesis and characterization of cathode materials like lithium manganese and lithium vanadium phosphate. He has about dozen publications to his credit.

Dr. Sivakumar’s current research interest is focused on understanding about the phase transition behaviors of nano-structured lithium phosphate materials during lithium extraction which is used for energy storage devices.

Dr. Subramanian K. R. V.

Associate Professor

Dr. K. R. V. Subramanian joined Amrita in July 2008 after obtaining his PhD from Cambridge University in England. His doctoral dissertation focused on the development and characterization of several unary and multi-component oxide electron beam resists that are suitable for high resolution electron beam nanolithography. He also worked for a brief period as a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA where he was involved in device fabrication (cancer cell charge sensing) and high-resolution electron beam lithography studies on a widely used electron beam resist, poly (methylmethacrylate). He continued his post-doctoral research at IISc, Bangalore where he oversaw work on zinc oxide and conducting polymers. Dr. Subramanian has about a dozen publications to his credit with some in high impact journals, such as Nanoletters and Advanced Materials.

Dr. Subramanian is one of the research investigators for the Amrita Nano-Solar project that aims to investigate and develop highly efficient and cost-effective nanostructured photovoltaic cells. Some concepts being investigated include transport processes in quantum dot sensitized nanotube solar cells and hybrid solar cell designs for energy generation and storage.

Dr. Sujit Nair

Assistant Professor

Dr. Sujit Nair joined Amrita in August 2008 after obtaining his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Center for Cancer Chemoprevention Research and the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA. He also holds a master’s degree (M. Pharm.) in Pharmaceutics from the Principal K. M. Kundnani College of Pharmacy and a bachelor’s degree (B.Pharm.) in Pharmacy from the Bharati Vidyapeeth’s College of Pharmacy, both affiliated with the University of Mumbai (Bombay). He was actively involved in teaching students of the Doctor of Pharmacy (Pharm.D.) program at Rutgers University before returning to India to join Amrita University.
Dr. Nair has won many laurels throughout his stellar academic career including First Rank in the University of Mumbai Pharmacy Examination (1997), outstanding Head-Teaching Assistant award from the Graduate School at Rutgers University (2005) and Faculty Award for Excellence from Amrita University (2010), amongst others.

Dr. Nair's research interests at the Cancer Discovery Biology Laboratory are geared towards understanding the mechanistic basis of cancer, and the discovery of novel biomarkers and drug molecules to aid in the prevention and treatment of cancer, as well as studies on drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics of anti-cancer agents.

He is a member of the American Association for Cancer Research, Indian Association for Cancer Research and the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists.  He has more than twenty international publications in peer-reviewed journals to his credit and serves as a reviewer for several international journals. He is a recipient of the Rapid Grant for Young Investigators (2009) from the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India.

Dr. Ullas Mony

Assistant Professor

Dr. Ullas Mony received his masters degree and his doctorate degree (Haematology) from the University of Nottingham, UK. He joined Amrita as Assistant Professor in April 2009. During his research career he received some prestigious awards such as Overseas Research Scholarship, British Association of Cancer Research Student award, and Developing Solutions Scholarship (University of Nottingham).

Dr. Mony's research interest is in studying the regulation of normal and malignant haematopoietic stem and progenitor cells, therapeutic targeting of minimum residual disease in acute myeloid leukemia and stem cell signaling. He is also interested in the area of cancer nanotechnology, stem cell therapeutics and tissue engineering. All his publications are in international journals.

He is a member of the British Association of Cancer Research (BACR) and European Association of Cancer Research (EACR).

Dr. Vinoth K Lakshmanan

Assistant Professor

Dr. Vinoth K Lakshmanan joined Amrita Center for Nanosciences in July 2009. He obtained his PhD from University of Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France. His postdoctoral training was at Universitatsklinikum Regensburg (UKR), Bavaria and Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (FZK), Germany. He has received the prestigious French award Association pour la Recherche sur le Cancer (ARC).

One of his major motivators for the past seven years has been to grasp the function of the overexpressed gene in cancer, especially breast and prostate cancer.

Dr. Vinoth has also gained valuable experience from the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) New Delhi, India towards elucidating the immune responses induced by Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Secretory Antigens (MTSA) by dendritic cells. He has peer reviewed international journals.

His current research interest focuses on molecular biomarker in cancer nano-research and developing ultrasensitive protein detection for early diagnosis.

Dr.Basan Gowda S Kurkalli

Assistant Professor

Dr.Basan Gowda S Kurkalli joined Amrita Center for Nanoscience and Molecular Medicine (ACNS & MM) as Assistant Professor in November 2011. He received his doctorate degree in Faculty of Medicine from Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel, MSC in Zoology from Annamalai University Chidambaram, Tamilnadu and BSc in Zoology from Karnataka University Dharwar, Karnataka State.

He served three years as a postdoctoral fellow in the department of bone marrow transplantation, Hadassah/Hebrew University Hospital, Jerusalem, Israel. Prior to joining ACNS & MM he served as Research Scientist/Investigator-in-Charge for a period of 4 years at Cognate Bioservices Ltd., Tel Aviv, Israel, as a part of Cognate Bioservices, Inc. USA. He has 7-8yrs of clinical research experience assisting researchers/ neurosurgeons/orthopaedicians of various collaborating clinical research centers at Zagreb (Republic of Croatia), Greece (Athens), Istanbul, India and Mexico to carry out clinical infusion (intrathecal and or intravenous) of ex-vivo expanded autologous/ allogenic stem cells of clinical grade (processed in GMP facility) to almost 225-250 patients from all over the world.

His proposed area of research interests at this center (ACNS & MM) is to use his doctoral/ postdoctoral research work and industry experience to develop the area of Stem Cell Technology for Translational Medicine from bench to bedside. He has interest in various neurological diseases like Multiple Sclerosis, Amytrophic Lateral Scelorosis, Motor Neuron diseases, Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, Parkinson disease, spinal injury/trauma and also has interest in orthopedic interventions.

He has to his credit 2 national and 10 international research articles. In addition, he has 5 issued patents and has one chapter in a book.