Ravi Radhakrishnan: Named as Chair of SEAS Department of Bioengineering

Dr. Ravi Radhakrishnan, who holds joint appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been named Chair of the SEAS Department of Bioengineering, effective January 1, 2020. He formerly served as the Director of the Penn Institute for Computational Science, of which he is a founding member. In addition, he is a member of the Penn Physical Sciences Oncology Center, Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics and several graduate groups, including Materials Science and Engineering, Genomics and Computational Biology, and Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics.

He directs a computational research laboratory with research interests at the interface of biophysics, chemical physics, and biomedical engineering. The goal of his computational molecular systems biology laboratory is to provide a quantitative multiscale and mechanistic characterization of complex systems and formulate accurate and predictive models for quantitative systems pharmacology and oncology applications. His lab specializes in several computational algorithms spanning the molecular and cellular scales, in conjunction with the theoretical formalisms of statistical mechanics, and applications of high-performance scientific computing in parallel architectures. He has successful and funded collaborations with pharmacologists, cell biologists, biophysical chemists, anesthesiologists, and oncologists primarily through grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the European Research Council.

Dr. Radhakrishnan holds many editorial board positions in the research community, including Nature Publishing’s Scientific Reports and has authored over 150 articles in leading peer-reviewed journals and serves as a referee for over 45 leading journals, publishers, and federal funding agencies.