Divarka SSM Uppu
Divakara is a chemist turned bioengineer and currently, an early-career researcher at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA. Divakara got his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, India. He did his postdoctoral training with Prof. Paula Hammond (MIT) at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, Singapore and a short stint at the Center for Soft and Living Matter, Institute for Basic Science, Ulsan, South Korea. His research interests lie in using chemistry to design and engineer soft bio- and nanomaterials for therapeutics and vaccines towards infectious diseases. He has developed antimicrobial polymers, and vaccine delivery strategies to skin using microneedles and polymer multilayers. His recent and current projects focus on developing bioengineered extracellular vesicles, a class of biological nanoparticles, from mammalian cells and bacteria towards functional materials.