Mentors
Dr. Rajeev Kumar
Mentor
Dr. Rajeev Kumar is a Professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, India. He received his Ph.D. in Machine Design from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee in 2008. Prior to joining IIT Mandi in 2010, he worked as a Technologist at the General Electric (GE) John F. Welch Technology Centre, Bengaluru, India.
His research interests include smart structures, piezoelectric and triboelectric energy harvesting, finite element methods, computational modeling, structural control, optimization using genetic algorithms, machine learning, metamaterials, and ropeway systems.
Dr. Kumar has published more than 90 research articles in reputed international journals and over 40 papers in national and international conference proceedings. He has successfully supervised 13 Ph.D. scholars and 10 M.S. (Research) students at IIT Mandi. He has also successfully completed several sponsored research and industrial consultancy projects funded by government agencies and industry.
Dr. Kiran Kulkarni
Mentor
Dr. Kiran Kulkarni is a Senior Principal Scientist in the Division of Biochemical Sciences at CSIR–National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, and a Professor of the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR). He leads a multidisciplinary structural biology group investigating cellular signalling mechanisms that regulate cell shape, migration and proliferation, with a particular emphasis on Rho-family GTPases and their roles in cancer progression and metastasis. His research integrates X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy, biophysics, molecular and cellular biology, computational modelling, molecular dynamics simulations, and artificial intelligence/machine learning.
Dr. Kulkarni obtained his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, under the supervision of the late Prof. M. Vijayan. He subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, where he contributed to landmark structural studies of the mitotic checkpoint complex and the integral membrane protease Rce1, published in Nature. His broader research contributions include structural and mechanistic studies of DOCK-family guanine nucleotide exchange factors, Rho GTPase signalling, membrane proteins, lectin–carbohydrate interactions, and the development of mini-protein therapeutics.
He has authored 37 research publications, with more than 1,200 citations, and is an inventor on three patents. He has secured and contributed to several nationally and internationally funded research programmes supported by CSIR, DBT, DST, DAE-BRNS, ICGEB and industry. His distinctions include the ICGEB International Cancer Research Grant, the Diamond Light Source Award, and election as a Fellow of the Maharashtra Academy of Sciences. Dr. Kulkarni has guided 10 Ph.D. scholars and 28 postgraduate and undergraduate dissertations and has extensive teaching experience in structural biology, computational biology, cancer biology, cellular signalling and molecular recognition.
