FACULTY

Prof. N. Yathindra, Director Prof. N. Yathindra is Director, Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology (IBAB). He received his Ph.D. from the Center of Advanced Study in Biophysics, University of Madras. His postdoctoral work was carried out at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Prof. Yathindra has served as Chairman, School of Physical Sciences and Dean-Academic at University of Madras. His research involves the use of computational approaches to study structure and function of biological macromolecules. He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Kshitish Acharya, obtained his doctoral degree from the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. He did post-doctoral research at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and then at the University of Virginia. Thereafter, he was heading the research and production unit of a growing biotechnology company in India. Dr. Kshitish is basically a reproductive biologist and has used molecular biology extensively in his research work. Though he is particularly interested in studying differential transcriptional regulation in reproductive vs. other systems, he has multiple research interests and enjoys flexibility in technical approaches. He has been with IBAB since March 2003. Apart from teaching and research, he was the key person handling the very popular Postgraduate programme in Biotechniques. He is currently heading the short term courses. More..

	Dr. Shipra Agrawal has ten years of research and teaching experience in the areas of plant biotechnology and bioinformatics. Previously she was a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Allahabad. Recently, as a post-doctoral fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Center of Advanced and Scientific Research (JNCASR) Bangalore, her research was in the area of motif based characterization of human meiotic recombination hotspots, transcriptional regulation of the human PC4 gene, computational analysis work on chromatin remodeling factors and modeling and simulation studies on mouse importin-4. In addition, she also worked on micro-RNA precursor prediction from non-coding RNA
	Dr. Andreas Bender has been the lead faculty for the Postgraduate Cheminformatics Course several times. Dr. Bender's work comprises descriptor and classification algorithm development and evaluation, as well as applications to predict biological targets for small molecules. Andreas received his PhD from the University of Cambridge (UK) developing virtual screening methods working with Prof. Robert C. Glen at the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics / Department of Chemistry. He was a Cambridge Gates Scholar and a member of Darwin College while at Cambridge and is the author of more than 30 publications in the cheminformatics and bioinformatics fields and referee for several journals in the area.  Further information can be found at http://www.andreasbender.de.

	Dr. Bibha Chaudhury received her PhD from BHU, Varanasi. Subsequently she did post-doctoral work in the US. She taught at the Manipal University and joined IBAB in April 2011. Her work focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms involved in specification and differentiation of cardiomyocytes using embroyonic stem cells. The role of cell-cell interaction, signalling molecules and micro-RNA during differentiation of embroyonic stem cells to multiple cell lineages will be investigated.
	Dr. Srinivas V. Kaveri, adjunct faculty at IBAB, is a Director of Research at INSERM in Paris. A veterinarian by training, he received his PhD from the Pasteur Institute and did post-doctoral work at the University of California. He leads a team at INSERM at the Centre de Recherche des Cordeliers in Paris. His work relates to the molecular mechanisms of immunopathology and immunotherapy. Aside from over 150 publications, he has several patents to his name. He has received research grants from several national and international bodies, and has received awards from CNRS and INSERM.
	Dr. Ashwini Mathur, adjunct faculty at IBAB, received his Ph.D. in Biostatistics from University of California, Berkeley and subsequently taught as a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco campus before joining GSK (US) in 1996. He headed GSK's Biometrics operations in India till 2006 and now heads the Biostatistics and Statistical Reporting operation of Novartis in India. He is a member of American Statistical Association and Secretary of International Biometrics Society. He has more than 35 medical collaborative papers in international journals, 2 book chapters and numerous invited lectures, presentations and posters at international conferences.
	Dr. Binay Panda, adjunct faculty at IBAB, received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, UK and was an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA. Before returning to India to set up Ganit Labs, he co-founded a molecular diagnostics startup company in the San Francisco bay area with a focus on early detection of cancer. Prior to that, he worked at Affymetrix's Santa Clara, California and Tokyo, Japan offices where he was instrumental in building the company's scientific operations in Japan. Binay was a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo, Japan and taught molecular diagnostics at the University of California, Santa Cruz extension. Binay is also a visiting professor at the Mazumdar Shaw Cancer Centre, Narayana Hrudayalaya, Bangalore and has research and commercialization interest in genomics and personalized medicine.
	Prof. Naren Ramakrishnan, adjunct faculty at IBAB, is an associate professor of computer science and faculty fellow at Virginia Tech. His research interests are in the areas of software systems for computational science, data mining, and information management, especially as they pertain to bioinformatics applications. He has contributed to the development of software systems such as Expresso and JigCell that automate tedious aspects of microarray experiment management and cell cycle modeling, respectively. His current research focus is the development of novel data mining techniques that expose important abstractions to biologists for problem solving and knowledge discovery. Ramakrishnan currently serves on the editorial board of IEEE Computer. He holds a Ph.D. in computer sciences from Purdue University in 1997. More information about his teaching and research is available at: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~naren.

Dr. Gayatri Saberwal did her PhD in the life sciences at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad. She then did post-doctoral work at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York. She has been involved with the Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology since its establishment in 2001. Her research and teaching relates to the biotech industry, both in India and abroad. Dr. Saberwal also spearheads the entrepreneurship activities at the institute and is involved in its business incubator.

	Dr. Subha Srinivasan has a PhD from the Centre of Advanced Study in Biophysics, University of Madras. Before joining IBAB she was founder and CEO of Jivan Biologics, a start up company that specializes in microarray services for alternative splicing. Prior to this Subha headed the bioinformatics unit at Berlex Biosciences, a fully-owned subsidiary of Schering AG. She also has 10 years of experience at Immunex, a Seattle-based biotechnology company where she was hired to head the molecular modeling group, later assuming the responsibility of setting up a bioinformatics core facility. Her research areas include protein structure prediction, homology modeling, gene discovery, alternative splicing, microarrays and next generation sequencing.
	Dr. R Srivatsan did his PhD in Physics from TIFR, Mumbai and worked more than 10 years in the fields of Astronomy and Plasma Physics before shifting to bioinformatics. Before joining IBAB, he worked in Strand Life Sciences and Geschickten Biosciences, both in Bangalore, on systems biology modeling and microarray data analysis. At IBAB his research activities will be on the development of new algorithms, analysis methods and software tools in the field of computational biology.
	Dr. Rajani Kanth Vangala, adjunct faculty at IBAB, did his PhD at the Ludwig Maximilains University, Munich, Germany and then worked as postdoctoral fellow at Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden and then at Department of Hematology, Imperial College London, UK. He has since worked in several companies and was involved in novel technology developments. His research usually is based on applied biotechnology: where a specific need in the area of biotechnology is identified, possible technology solutions are developed. These solutions can result in technology platforms which can be licensed out to companies or used in-house to provide solutions. Some of the ongoing projects in his lab are (a) developing an instrument-free DNA amplification and genotyping technology; (b) developing metal oxide nanoparticles based technologies for recombinant DNA applications; (c) developing bio-nanoparticles for long term stem cell culture and storing and (d) identifying novel biomarkers for diagnostics, patient stratification, companion diagnostics and drug development.
	Dr. Shireen Vali, adjunct faculty at IBAB, received her PhD in Neurobiology from University of California, Davis in 1997, where she studied the signal transduction pathway involved in the regulation of a metabolic gene in mouse. She subsequently did her post-doctoral research at Stanford University Medical School in cystic fibrosis. At Stanford she also developed various Online Continued Medical Education (CME) courses. Dr. Vali has also worked in the field of histopathology at a biotech company. She joined IBAB as a Faculty Scientist in 2003 and her research interests include the area of proteomics and studying the repertoire of multiprotein complexes involved in cellular function and signalling. She has recently started a company, Cellworks Group Inc. The company was incubated at IBAB for the first six months.