Senior Investigator
The Bhagi-Damodaran lab uses tools in chemistry and biology to discover new drugs and design novel catalysts. To achieve these goals, we focus on proteins that use metals as cofactors, called metalloproteins. Metalloproteins are excellent candidates for drug discovery and catalysis as both biochemical (e.g. crystallography, activity assays, NMR) and inorganic chemistry (e.g. UV-Vis, EPR, EXAFS) techniques can be used to investigate and characterize them. Research in the Bhagi-Damodaran lab is focused on (1) Blocking and rewiring metalloprotein-based redox signaling towards next-generation therapeutics and (2) Engineering new catalysts via rational design and directed evolution of metal-dependent proteins and enzymes.
