Dr Arun Prasad Pandurangan, a Gonville & Caius College Teaching Associate, has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology.

“It is a great honour. I am delighted to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology,” he said.

“This is very encouraging as I continue to give back to science and the Society. I am very grateful to my current and previous employers, funding bodies, colleagues, friends, and collaborators for their generous support.”

Dr Pandurangan is a Senior Research Associate at the Heart and Lung Research Institute, Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge. He completed his PhD from the Department of Crystallography and Biophysics, University of Madras, India (2003-2010). During his PhD, he developed original ab initio methods for protein-peptide docking and protein structure prediction.

He worked at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge as an Investigator Scientist (2017-2021). He was a Researcher at the European Bioinformatics Institute (2017), Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge (2015-2016), and the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology at Birkbeck/UCL (2009-2015).

Arun’s research interest focuses on the development of computational tools to predict protein structures and ligand-receptor complexes; elucidate biological function by fitting and validating atomic models in cryo-electron microscopy maps; predict the effects of mutations on protein stability and interaction; computational genomics and understanding the emergence of drug resistance. Arun’s current research focusses on developing knowledge-based and machine learning tools to understand the emergence of drug resistance in infectious diseases and cancer.

“As a computation biologist it is exciting to be at the interface between physics, chemistry, mathematics, and biology,” he says.

“With the recent revolution in genomics, structural biology, and machine learning techniques, I am hopeful and optimistic that good things will follow for the betterment of the science and the society in general.”

In parallel to research, Arun is passionate about teaching, mentoring, public engagement, and charitable work. He has given career talks for school students from less advantaged background, actively mentoring and supporting women in STEM subjects and volunteered at various science public events including Cambridge Science Festival and Big Biology Day. He serves on several editorial boards of international journals including BMC Bioinformatics, Current Research in Structural Biology, Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences and Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal. He is the chair of the Royal Society of Biology, East Anglia Branch.