About me

Working at the interface of material science, biology, and medicine, my career commitment is to invent technology for addressing the major unmet needs in health care. Broadly, I am interested in engineering novel biomaterials for drug delivery and biomedical applications. The interdisciplinary nature of my work led to several publications, three US patents, and a potential commercial product currently being considered for translation as COVID nasal spray developed at Brigham and Women’s hospital. A strong foundation in pharmaceutical sciences helped me to tackle numerous challenges in my research endeavor meticulously.

During my PhD, I designed and developed a novel platform to fabricate biocompatible polymeric nanofibrous threads. For the first time, we integrated textile technology principles along with a nanofiber production technique to achieve a major milestone. This work currently holds a US patent and was published in the high impact factor journal ‘Nano Letters’ in 2015 with me as sole first author and two corresponding authors. The nanofibrous thread’s enormous surface area unveiled limitless benefits in tissue engineering, drug delivery, wearable electronics, etc. During my PhD, I explored the utility of the nanofibrous thread by engineering a unique weaving technology to fabricate synthetic vascular grafts and investigate the unique characteristic of the nanotextiles, published in the high-status journal ‘ACS applied materials and interfaces’. This work on nanotextiles also explored the feasibility of using the nano-biomaterial as small-diameter vascular grafts.

Moreover, the material has the potential for a paradigm shift that can benefit more than 200 million cardiovascular disease patients. In the final year, I got an opportunity to work as a visiting PhD scholar in the Department of Cardiac Surgery at the University of Bristol, UK. An esteemed international scholarship,’ Commonwealth fellowship,’ funded the one-year study, providing the opportunity to investigate the biological interaction of the nanotextile-based vascular graft in the porcine model. During this period, I have gained experience in the surgical procedures performed at cutting-edge GLP-graded operation theatres. Overall, my PhD work innovation resulted in developing a new research area, which eventually led to further exploration by five post-graduate and four PhDs. This work has also received good reviews from the scientific community and international collaborations with Northeastern University (US), University of Bristol (UK), and Kyoto (Japan). To date, the platform is explored for drug delivery applications like ovarian cancer, biliary stent, and tissue engineering applications, including bone, vascular, cardiac, and nerve regeneration.

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow with world-renowned scientists Prof. Jeffrey Karp and Dr. Nitin Joshi at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical school. My fellowship is supported by a prestigious ‘Fulbright scholarship’ for two years. Here, we leverage novel biomaterials for long-acting drug delivery platforms to treat diseases like HIV, asthma, esophagitis, and opioid-use disorder with a translational approach. We work closely with outstanding scientists and clinicians at MIT, Harvard, Wake Forest institute, and other industries. In the beginning phase of the pandemic crisis, I actively worked on developing a long-lasting nasal spray and an intranasal device to prevent the transmission of respiratory pathogens. The nasal spray can capture and instantaneously deactivate various respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2. My work on the nasal spray has been featured in the newspaper ‘Boston Herald’. We have filed a US patent and are currently in the process of commercializing the pocket-size nasal spray to prevent the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, we envision our nasal spray to curtail the dissemination of the newly evolving virus, saving millions of lives in an unanticipated pandemic.