Affiliation: Durham University, UK

Dr Aakash Basu is an Assistant Professor at Durham University, UK. The overall goal of his research is to understand molecular processes in biology from the principles of mechanics. In his current research, he uses a combination of genomic, single-molecule biophysical, and biochemical techniques to understand how the mechanical properties of DNA and chromatin are genetically programmed, and impact the transduction of genetic information. Prior to starting his independent group at Durham, Dr Basu was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, where he developed genomic methods to measure the sequence-dependence of the mechano-structural properties of DNA. Dr Basu obtained a PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University, working on how topoisomerases transduce chemical energy in ATP into mechanical work required to supercoil DNA.