Dr. A. Ajith Kumar an alumnus of the Department of Biochemistry, University of Hyderabad (UoH) has been awarded the prestigious Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellowship. The tenure of fellowship will start from January 2022 for a period of 5 years.
Dr. A. Ajith Kumar
Ajith Kumar obtained his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 2017 from UoH, under the supervision of Prof. N. Siva Kumar, and worked in the area of Glycobiology. Dr. Ajith Kumar was also an active member of the First International Research Training Group in Molecular and Cellular Glycosciences at the University, an international collaborative research group between the UoH and the University of Muenster, Germany.
Dr. Ajith Kumar is currently a postdoc at the Molecular Biophysics Unit in the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru with a DBT Fellowship and is working with Dr. Ashok Sekhar. Ajith will continue to work in Bengaluru on the proposed project which is on Applying high-resolution NMR spectroscopy to study the activity of the CRISPR-Cas12 protein. The information will be used to rationally engineer the protein to negate the non-specific off-target DNase activity so that the protein is more suitable for genome editing applications. The project will be done in close collaboration with Dr. Amit Choudhary, University of Harvard.