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BE Seminar – Neha Kamat, “Harnessing membrane-protein interactions to engineer synthetic and cellular lipid membranes”
February 5 at 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Membranes play a vital role in a variety of physiological processes. Recreating these processes outside of the cell will allow us to better understand them as well as design an entirely new class of materials that can sense, transport, or target important biological signals and molecules. In this talk, I will present our recent work harnessing lipid-protein interactions to design membrane-based nanoparticles for biosensing and therapeutic applications. Our approach, bridging synthetic biology techniques and model membrane assembly, provides an innovative yet simple method to probe the role of membrane composition and biophysical properties on protein dynamics and to advance the design of nanoparticles that leverage membrane protein activity.
Neha Kamat, PhD
Associate Professor, Northwestern University
Neha Kamat is an Associate Professor at Northwestern University in the Biomedical Engineering Department in Evanston, Illinois. She was trained as a bioengineer with special emphasis in biophysical analysis of biological and synthetic membranes, and in the production and characterization of membrane proteins using cell-free protein expression systems. She received a BS in Bioengineering from Rice University, a PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University/ Massachusetts General Hospital. At Northwestern University, the Kamat lab’s main research interests are to understand and harness biological membranes as a biomaterial for (i) fundamental biological studies related to membrane protein folding and function and (2) translational applications in diagnostics and disease. Neha is the recipient of a Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Research Office, an NSF CAREER Award, and the ACS Synthetic Biology Young Innovator Award.