Sanjay Kumar, M.D., Ph.D., was appointed Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley in 2005, promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2011, and promoted to Full Professor in 2014. He is currently Chancellor’s Professor and Chair of the Bioengineering Department. He is also Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UC Berkeley and a Faculty Scientist in the Biological Systems & Engineering Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Kumar is an elected Fellow of AIMBE and BMES. He and his research group have been fortunate to receive a number of honors, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), The NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Stem Cells Young Investigator Award. Dr. Kumar has also received awards by student vote for Excellence in Graduate Advising (UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering) and Outstanding Teaching (Bioengineering Honor Society) and has served as a Presidential Chair Teaching Fellow. Work in his laboratory has been sponsored by grants and fellowships from NIH, NSF, DOD, AHA, CRCC, LBNL, CIRM, The Beckman Foundation, the Keck Foundation, the Siebel Scholars Program, the DOE Molecular Foundry and the University of California.
Dr. Kumar earned a B.S. in chemical engineering (1996) from the University of Minnesota, where he studied lipid self-assembly in the laboratory of Matt Tirrell. He then moved on to Johns Hopkins University, where he earned an M.D. (2003) and a Ph.D. in molecular biophysics (2003) as a fellow of the NIH Medical Scientist Training Program. During the graduate portion of his training, he investigated the structure and energetics of neuronal intermediate filaments in the laboratories of Jan Hoh of the School of Medicine and Mike Paulaitis of the Department of Chemical Engineering. From 2003-2005, he served as an NIH research fellow with Don Ingber at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, where he examined the nanoscale mechanics and dynamics of cytoskeletal structures in living cells and developed nanomagnetic technologies to control receptor-mediated signaling.
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