Pushpanathan Muthuirulan

Pushpanathan Muthuirulan
Research Associate
Harvard University, USA

Biography

Dr. Pushpanathan Muthuirulan is currently a Research Associate at the Harvard University Studying the Developmental and Genetic basis of human height variations using functional genomics approaches. Prior to this, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at NICHD, National Institutes of Health. His postdoctoral work had focused on developing state of art tools using CRISPR-cas9 and high-resolution imaging to map neurotransmitter receptors to neural circuits that involves visual motion processing in Drosophila. He received his Ph.D. in Microbiology from Department of Genetics, Madurai Kamaraj University, India. During his Ph.D., he took particular satisfaction in answering emerging problem of antifungal drug resistance using metagenomics approaches. He had discovered a novel antifungal peptide, MMGP1 from marine metagenome and characterized its distinct antifungal mechanism against human fungal pathogens such as Candida albicans and Aspergillus Niger. He has expertise in Microbiome analysis, Omics technologies (Genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics), antimicrobial drug discovery, protein engineering and mapping neural circuits.