Affiliation: Stanford University

Ahanjit Bhattacharya is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Chemistry, Stanford University. During 2014-2020, Ahanjit carried out his doctoral research at the University of California San Diego. He worked on designing artificial cellular systems from fundamental building blocks. He also has a deep interest in understanding the origins and of life. Ahanjit's major accomplishments are the development of lipid compartments as programmable synthetic cells and organelles, and the development of minimal biochemical strategies for the synthesis of membrane-forming lipids. Currently, he is working on physical mechanisms of fusion of enveloped viruses with model lipid membranes using DNA-lipid conjugates as a key tool. He is also trying to understand structure-function relationships in complex archaeal lipids. He uses a host of biophysical tools which includes small-angle X-ray scattering, single-particle TIRF microscopy, and electron microscopy.