Dr Navaneethan Palanisamy
Senior Lecturer
Biography
Navaneethan completed his BTech in Biotechnology at VIT University, Vellore campus (India) in 2010. He did his bachelor thesis under Prof. C. Rajasekaran (VIT University) and Prof. Sunil Nautiyal, ISEC, Bengaluru (India). He then moved to Uppsala University (Sweden) where he completed his MMedSci in Infection Biology in 2013. For his thesis, he worked on tigecycline resistance in Escherichia coli under Prof. Dan I Andersson. In 2012, he received Max Planck Society stipend (Germany) and pursued his MSc in Molecular Biology at Goettingen University (Germany), finishing in 2014. During this period, he did his thesis on Spinach aptamers under Dr. Claudia Hoebartner at Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Goettingen (Germany). After this, he had a short stay at McGill University, Montreal (Canada) working under Prof. Mark Wainberg on drug resistance in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and drug development against dengue virus (DENV). Between 2015 and 2020, he did his PhD at Heidelberg University, Heidelberg (Germany) working on chromosome segregation and cell division in E. coli, inteins, and optogenetics in the lab of Prof. Barbara Di Ventura.
Teaching and Supervision
Programme Leader for MSc Infection and Immunity Module Leader for, 1) MD5028 (Advanced Microbiology), 2) MD7006 (Clinical Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis) & 3) MD7025 (Infectious Disease) Interim Module Leader for, 1) MD7026 (Advanced Immunology) & 2) MD6030 (Medical Microbiology) Delivered Lectures in, 1) MD4008 (Introduction to Microbiology), 2) MD5028 (Advanced Microbiology), 3) MD6028 (Virology), 4) MD6030 (Medical Microbiology), 5) MD6037 (Cell Signalling), 6) MD7006 (Clinical Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis), 7) MD7025 (Infectious Disease) & 8) MD7026 (Advanced Immunology)
Research and Knowledge Exchange
Main interests: Antimicrobial drug resistance (focus on bacteria and viruses), Bioinformatics (focus on molecular dynamics, sequence analysis & evolutionary studies), Molecular biology (focus on chromosome separation in E. coli & development of molecular biology tools), Biochemistry (focus on protein purification) & Synthetic biology (focus on optogenetics, inteins & aptamers)