About Me

  • Associate Director of Research and Assistant Professor of Practice at The Notre Dame Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health (IPH) | Assistant Research Professor in the Bioengineering graduate program in Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering (concurrent)

  • Co-Navigator for University of Notre Dame’s Indiana Clinical Translational Sciences Institute (I-CTSI) (Fall 2023 to present)

  • NDNANO Assistant Research Professor (Adjunct-Bioengineering program in Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering), 2019

  • Gordon Battelle Postdoctoral Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 2013

  • Ph.D. (Biomedical Sciences) Old Dominion University, 2010

  • B.Tech. (Industrial Biotechnology) – A.C.Tech., Anna University, 2003

I am a nanoparticle engineer with more than 12 years of multidisciplinary expertise in the synthesis of nanomaterials, biomedical imaging, cancer biology, nanotoxicology, and targeted therapeutics/ diagnostics. Contact me for collaborations, partnerships, and consulting opportunities.
The driving force behind my research is to make nanoparticle-based technologies accessible to all research groups. I use my unique interdisciplinary research experience with nanoscale sensor materials, to elucidate inter-cell trafficking and defense mechanisms of abnormal cells (e.g., cancer) with the aim of exploiting this knowledge for early detection and targeted therapies. I have secondary research interests in nanotoxicology and scaling up the synthesis of nanomaterials from lab scale to pilot scale with a niche focus on anisotropic and Janus nanoparticles. I have tertiary interests in the application of plasmonic nanomaterials in the field of metamaterials, sensors, catalysis and improving the efficiency of renewable energy sources.
I have won multiple awards as a consultant for Innocentive (a crowd-sourced initiative by former Eli Lilly scientists), and I am a successful applicant for research grants in an academic setting. My combined work experience in industry, academics and as a consultant gives me a diverse skill set that makes me highly adaptable and allows me to work strongly in an individual as well as in a team setting
As part of my research, I have
– published more than 34 peer-reviewed journal articles,
– been cited more than 2750 times,
– co-authored 1 book chapter,
– 4 patent applications