Arnab Mukherjee

Biography

Arnab Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara where his lab started in the summer of 2018. Prior to arriving at UCSB, he completed a Boswell Fellowship in Molecular Engineering at Caltech (with Prof. Mikhail Shapiro) and obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (with Prof. Charles Schroeder). Research in the Mukherjee group has been recognized with notable recent awards including an Outstanding Young Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health (R35 MIRA), a Discovery Award from the Department of Defense, and the NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.

Research

Fluorescent proteins provide an incredibly powerful means for exploring biological function at the molecular and cellular scales in living systems. However, light does not penetrate opaque tissues, which hinders the use of fluorescent probes in complex in vivo environments like the brain and deeply buried infections. Our group approaches this challenge by pursuing the development of molecular MRI reporters to image biological targets and biochemical activity located at any arbitrary depth inside live vertebrates. We draw on an assortment of techniques from molecular biology, protein engineering, gene editing, in vivo gene delivery, mammalian synthetic biology, nanoscale phage assembly, and animal (mice) models to create MRI probes for applications in cancer biology, neuroscience, and microbial imaging. At the core, our scientific efforts focus on retooling naturally found biomolecules for imaging living systems in non-traditional ways: for example by modulating water movement in and out of cells, converting immunity proteins into calcium biosensors, and co-opting radioprotective peptides for imaging bacteria inside opaque tissues.