Expert in Synthetic Biology, Protein Engineering, and Biomedical Imaging
Dr. Arnab Mukherjee is an Associate Professor with joint appointments in the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He completed a James G. Boswell Fellowship in Molecular Engineering at Caltech under Prof. Mikhail Shapiro, and earned his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He holds an undergraduate degree in Biotechnology from IIT Madras, where he was among the early alumni of the Bhupat & Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences.
At the Mukherjee Lab, his team works at the intersection of synthetic biology, protein engineering, MRI, and biophysics to develop genetic tools and gene circuits that monitor and modulate cellular functions — with the goal of advancing our understanding of complex biological systems and accelerating gene- and cell-based therapies for cancer and neurological disorders.
Dr. Mukherjee’s research is funded by the NIH and the Department of Defense, and has been recognized with several awards including the NIH MIRA Outstanding Young Investigator Award, the DoD Discovery Award, the NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and the 2022 Scialog Fellows Award in Advanced Bioimaging.
His lab’s contributions include pioneering a new class of fully genetic MRI reporters based on aquaporin water channels, developing the first genetically encodable calcium biosensor for MRI, and creating drug-switchable “multicolor” imaging reporters and protease-activatable biosensing circuits. A recent focus extends this work toward imageable genetic technologies targeting disease-relevant proteins in the extracellular proteome.