Our Faculty

Dr. Girish C. M. completed Ph. D. in Nanomedical Sciences from Amrita Centre for Nanosciences & Molecular Medicine, 2015 and he joined back as a faculty in the same year. Soon after, Dr. Girish received the prestigious INSPIRE Faculty Award from the Department of Science & Technology, Govt of India. Dr. Girish has completed his M. Tech. in Nanomedical Sciences from Amrita Centre for Nanosciences & Molecular Medicine and B. Tech. in Biomedical Engineering from Bharath University, Chennai. He has extensive experience in developing Raman spectroscopy as a cancer detection tool. He has used this technique on several head and neck cancer patient samples successfully. His main research focus is on the translation of portable Raman systems for cancer detection. In addition, Dr. Girish has extensive hands-on experience in synthesizing various nanomaterial systems, exploring surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy in biological detection and expertise in advanced nano-imaging tools like atomic force microscope. He is also working on mass spectrometry-based approaches for molecular diagnosis of cancer and methods for detecting circulating tumor cells.

Research

Currently, Dr. Girish’s lab is working on the clinical translation of Raman spectroscopy for cancer diagnosis. Raman spectroscopy is a well-established tool for the characterization of materials based on the vibrational signatures. It is also well studied in characterizing cell and tissues based on the biochemical variations related to pathological changes on course of disease progression. However, no major clinical translation has been witnessed. This is mainly due to the weak nature of Raman signals and complexity in spectral data analysis. Here, Dr. Girish’s lab has developed a novel surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopic substrate (SERS) which can enhance the signals from the samples thereby improve the classification accuracy. In the initial phase of the study, malignant, pre-malignant and healthy oral tissues were classified with an overall accuracy of 97%. The lab is also pursuing an integrated approach of combining Raman spectroscopy and mass spectrometry to have the molecular diagnosis of cancers.