Dr. R.
Sankararamakrishnan (Sankar) was born in 1964 at Periyakulam
in Tamil Nadu. He completed his schooling from his native
village Melmangalam, located in the foot hills of the Western
Ghats . He obtained Bachelor's degree in Chemistry and Mathematics
under the "Double Major" system from Madura College,
affiliated to Madurai Kamaraj University. He received Master's
degree in Mathematics from the same college. Subsequently,
he joined the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and received
his Ph D in Biophysics in 1992 under the supervision of Professor
Saraswathi Vishveshwara.
Dr. Sankar received Wellcome Trust post-doctoral
fellowship to work at the University of Oxford, U.K for a
period of three years in Professor Mark Sansom's laboratory.
He then moved to United States for a second post-doc to work
in the labs of Professors Shankar Subramaniam and Eric Jakobsson
at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In 1996,
Dr. Sankar joined Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York
as a junior faculty at Instructor level. He was then promoted
to Assistant Professor at Research track. He left Mount Sinai
in April 2002 to join the newly established Department of
Biological Sciences and Bioengineering (BSBE) at IIT-Kanpur.
At BSBE, he has established an active computational biology
group. In January 2005, Dr. Sankar was promoted to Associate
Professor in the same department.
Dr. Sankar's research work involves using
computational techniques to answer some of the basic questions
regarding the structure-function relationships of cancer proteins
and pharmaceutically important membrane proteins. Research
in Dr. Sankar's lab has recently identified proteins that
have possible role in arsenic poisoning. His group has contributed
to the understanding of certain non-covalent interactions
in protein structures and assembly of helical peptides/proteins.
He is also working on parametrization and protocols of bio-membrane
simulations. His work on proline-containing helices is part
of the "NIH guide to molecular modeling". Dr. Sankar
has received an equipment grant from IBM under the "Shared
University Resources" scheme. He has been recently invited
to join the Editorial Board of International Journal of Medical
Engineering and Informatics, a new journal to be published
by Inderscience Publishers. |
