Flu

Biography

Dr. Gyanendra Kumar earned his Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2007. He then joined the Biology Department of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York working as a Research Associate till 2012. He is currently a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Structural Biology, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, working on structure-based drug discovery for influenza by targeting the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase of the influenza virus. He has published numerous research articles in the field of drug discovery for diseases like malaria, botulism and influenza, and presented his work at regional as well as international conferences. He has served as a referee for various journals, and is a member of the American Chemical Society (since 2011), the American Crystallographic Association (since 2013) and the American Association for Advancement of Science (since 2013).

Research Interest

Dr. Kumar’s broad area of interest is structure-based drug discovery with emphasis on infectious diseases. He uses computational chemistry approaches like protein-ligand docking and virtual screening to identify inhibitors, and structural biology techniques like X-ray crystallography to deduce the atomic structures of macromolecules and their complexes with substrates and inhibitors in order to understand the intermolecular interactions and design better inhibitors. His current focus is on targeting the endonuclease activity of the influenza virus RdRp for drug discovery.