»Post Doctoral Fellows & Research Associates

Dr. Ayan Kumar Barui joined Chapman University School of Pharmacy in November 2021 as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Previously, Dr. Barui also worked as Associate Principal Scientist at Patanjali Research Foundation, Haridwar, India, and as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), South Korea. He received his Ph.D. degree in Nanomedicine from CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (CSIR-IICT), Hyderabad, India and the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), New Delhi, India. He has received the CSIR-UGC NET Junior Research Fellowship and Senior Research Fellowship from Govt. of India and has 9+ years of total experience with expertise in research and development in the field of Chemistry and Biotechnology through effectively managing collaborative Nanomedicine projects. His current research focuses on understanding the underlying causes of ciliopathies and the development of their treatment strategies using nanoparticles – based targeted drug delivery systems.

Dr. Karthikeyan Ramasamy joined Chapman University School of Pharmacy in November 2023 as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Ajay Sharma’s Team. He received his Ph. D degree in Biotechnology from Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu, India. He has received the DST-SERB & CSIR Junior Research Fellowship and Senior Research Fellowship from Govt. of India with expertise in cell biology and screening natural products as antiaging and anticancer agents. Previously Dr. Karthikeyan worked as Postdoctoral Research Associate in Department of Immunology, Allergy and Rheumatology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA where he worked on immunopathogenesis of allergic airway inflammation. His current research is investigating epithelial cells and fibroblasts crosstalk with innate immune cells in ocular Graft-versus-host disease (GvHD).

Dr. Devaraj Chandrashekar joined Chapman University School of Pharmacy as a Postdoctoral Fellow in June 2018. He received his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Hyderabad, India, and was the recipient of a post-graduate fellowship from All India Council of Technical Education, New Delhi. Previously he was associated with Dr. Mehvar’s research group where he worked on the development and optimization of drug metabolism studies and the characterization of cytochrome P-450 enzyme activities in subcellular fractions of various tissues, and also focused on animal model development of acute on chronic liver disease. Dr. Chandrashekar joined Dr. Sumbria’s research group and works to characterize the effect of alcoholic liver injury on neurovascular and neuronal degeneration and its impact on the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Chandrashekar technical expertise lies in isolation, characterization, and structural elucidation of phytochemical constituents using various analytical techniques and evaluating their biological activity.

Dr. Isabella Cattani-Cavalieri joined the Chapman University School of Pharmacy as a Postdoctoral Fellow in July 2021. She received dual Ph.D. degrees in Molecular Pharmacology at the Groningen Research Institute of Pharmacy at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and in Morphological Sciences at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The project of her Ph.D. investigated the role of air pollution and lung effects in inflammation and oxidative stress, and, more specifically, the impact on cAMP signaling and mitochondrial function. Dr. Cavalieri is investigating cAMP signaling compartmentation in airway smooth muscle and epithelial cells in the laboratory of Dr. Rennolds Ostrom.

Dr. Nataraj Jagadeesan joined Chapman University School of Pharmacy in August 2021 under the mentorship of Dr. Rachitha K Sumbria. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Neuroscience from Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu, India, where he made a seminal contribution to the Neuroprotective effect of Asiatic Acid, a triterpene of Centella asiatica on in vivo and in vitro models of Parkinson’s disease. He is the recipient of the DST-SERB Junior Research Fellowship and Senior Research Fellowship from Govt. of India. Dr. Jagadeesan’s current research focuses on solving the brain drug delivery problem for Alzheimer’s disease pathology.

Dr. Farideh Amirrad joined Chapman University School of Pharmacy in August 2015 as a graduate student, and in February 2022, joined as a Postdoctoral Fellow in a pharmaceutical Science program at Chapman University. During her master's in the pharmacokinetics laboratory, her study was about the main metabolizing enzyme, cytochrome P450, its enzymatic kinetics, and its distribution in different rat brain and liver subcellular fractions. She joined the molecular biology and translational laboratory for her Ph.D., where she studied the effect of PKD2 gene mutations on cardiac structure and function. She uses experimental animals, mammalian cells, molecular biology, and translational medicine to understand better and elucidate the pathways and mechanisms involved in cardiac disease. Her current research evaluates PGRMC2 gene mutations on cardiac structure (including fibrosis) and function. For her research, she uses different in vivo and in vitro methods, including pathology staining, analysis, and MRI.

Dr. Nunez received both his Master’s and PhD degrees from Chapman University, where he studied on the organization of cAMP signaling microdomains in lipid raft and non-raft regions in the plasma membrane and how these compartments generate unique cAMP signals that elicit specific responses. In one publication, he examined the role of long-term exposure of human lung fibroblast to cAMP-elevating agents and its implications in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Results from the study revealed that the prostaglandin E receptor 2 (EP2) was desensitized by a 24-hour treatment with ONO-AE-259, which resulted in unregulated phosphodiesterase 4 (PDE4) activity. His recent studies focused on the non-genomic signaling elicited by glucocorticoids and whether this signaling pathway can be leveraged as a novel therapeutic treatment for asthma. I found that glucocorticoids stimulate cAMP production through a Gs-coupled GPCR in mammalians cells and this non-genomic pathway contributes to one third of its overall genomic effects.

Dr. Young Woo Nam joined the Chapman University School of Pharmacy as a Postdoctoral Fellow in November 2015. He received his Ph.D. in Department of Biotechnology at University of Tokyo, Japan. He studied three-dimensional structures of Glycoside Hydrolases (GHs) for understanding cellular metabolisms and determined two novel crystal structures. One of his work was published in Journal of Biological Chemistry (2015). Dr. Nam is a structural biologist specializing in blending computational and experimental approaches to elucidate the molecular structure of proteins utilizing X-ray diffraction, computational biology image processing, bioinformatics and structural prediction. He is interested in protein conformational changes, protein-ligand interactions and structure-based drug design of small-conductance K+ channels (SK channels). Currently Dr. Nam researches with Dr. Zhang on the pharmacological modulation of KCa2/3 channels by small molecule drugs and structure based drug discovery for SK channels.