Affiliation: Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA

Dr. Mahesh Neralkar has over 8 years of experience in chemical glycobiology. He completed his doctoral studies with Prof. Srinivas Hotha at IISER, Pune in India in 2019, and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow working in the lab of Prof. Isaac Krauss at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA. His dissertation explored the development of glycosyl donors and higher oligosaccharides synthesis from the cell wall of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Currently, he is working on mRNA display evolved glycopeptide-based HIV-1 vaccine design. He has demonstrated large-scale synthesis of Man9GlcNAc2 glycan and connecting to peptide backbone using copper-assisted alkyne azide click chemistry to form glycopeptides. He uses techniques such as biolayer interferometry (BLI) and Saturated transfer difference (STD) NMR for the validation of synthetic glycopeptides as antigens for HIV-1 vaccines.