Professor Sumeet Mahajan MSc, MTech, PhD, FRSC
Professor of Molecular Biophotonics & Imaging, Head of Chemical Biology
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Prof Sumeet Mahajan is a Professor in Molecular Biophotonics & Imaging in Chemistry with a joint appointment in the Institute for Life Sciences at the University of Southampton. His group works at the life science interface. The overarching aim of the research in his group is to develop new spectroscopy and imaging techniques and apply them to extract chemical information from biological systems to understand disease processes for early, faster or more sensitive healthcare diagnostics.
Education and Professional experience
He has a diverse background and a range of professional experiences spanning disciplines which has shaped the current exciting interdisciplinary research activity in his group. He has published >92 papers, has 5 patents and book.
He majored in Chemistry after an integrated natural sciences and engineering Masters degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in 1998 and thereafter worked as a Scientist in Defence R&D Organization for 5 years developing analytical methods for environmental monitoring, process control and chemical sensors.
Subsequent to this industrial experience he did a Masters in Biomedical Engineering and worked on electrochemical conducting polymer sensors and actuators. His doctoral work was on electrodeposited nanostructures and their applications in optics and DNA detection with Prof. Phil Bartlett, FRS at the University of Southampton. As a postdoc he researched photonic applications of nanomaterials and nanospectroscopic techniques in the Nanophotonics Centre at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge with Prof. Jeremy Baumberg, FRS.
In 2010 after being awarded an EPSRC fellowship he setup his independent program in the area of ‘Biospectroscopy – spectroscopy inside living cells’ under the aegis of the ‘Physics of Medicine’ initiative at Cambridge. Since 2012 he leads his group at Southampton consisting of chemists, physicists, biologists and engineers conducting research at the interface of nanotechnology, spectroscopy, imaging and biomedicine. In 2015 he was awarded one of the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) grants to carry out frontier research on the development of next generation chemical imaging techniques for biomedical applications. Recently, under his leadership Southampton has been co-awarded an ambition programme under EPSRC's Transformative Healthcare 2050 scheme for developing label-free chemical imaging approaches deep inside human tissues.
Awards and Recognition
- 2015 ERC starting grant
- 2011 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Senior Research Fellowship by Magdalene College, Cambridge
- 2010 EPSRC Cross-Disciplinary Interface Program Fellowship Award
- 2008 Ronald Belcher Memorial Lectureship of the Royal Society of Chemistry
- 2008 Messel Bursar of the Society for Chemical Industry, UK
- 2005 ORSAS scholarship
- 1998 Proficiency Prize at IIT Kanpur for the best Masters dissertation