My research interests are broadly in the areas of nanobiomaterials and therapeutic systems. In this poster presentation I will give an overview of my proposed research plans and summarize my research experiences from my doctoral work done at Georgia Institute of Technology under the guidance of Professors Mark Prausnitz (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering) and Mark Feinberg (Vaccine Research Center, Emory Univesity)and my postdoctoral experience under the mentorship of Professor Richard Compans (Microbiology and Immunology) at Emory University.

The focus of my research is to integrate principles and techniques of engineering, immunology and recombinant DNA technology to rationally design and engineer novel responsive nanobiomaterials and microsystems to understand and probe fundamental issues in nanoscience, biomedical science and pharmaceutical science.

One of the fundamental issues in nanoscience that I will tackle involves development of architectural frameworks and scaffold for directed assembly of nanomaterials. While significant research has been done to develop nanomaterials, their directed and controlled assembly into 2-D and 3-D nanostructures and long-range organization and assembly for integration to the mesoscale continues to be a bottleneck. I will describe one of my proposed approaches to tackle this issue. Other research directions that I will describe include development of sensitive microneedle based painless biosensors, templating nanobiomaterials such as viruses and virus-like particles for developing hybrid nanomaterials and investigating recombinant peptide polymers as smart and tunable nanobiomaterials. Recombinant peptide polymers are a relatively new class of biopolymers synthesized in bacteria using recombinant DNA technology and they have potential to be used for drug delivery, as tissue engineering scaffolds, for development of biointerfaces and as transducers in sensors. I will focus on investigating structure-function relationships in peptide polymers to enable their controlled assembly as functional and smart nanobiomaterials and to use them as scaffolds for hybrid nanomaterial assembly.