Vignesh Athiyarath, Ph.D.

  • PostDoctoral Research Associate, Ulijn and Chen Lab, Nanoscience Initiative

Vignesh obtained B.Sc. degree in Chemistry from S.N.G.S. College Pattambi, (Kerala, India). He joined as a first Integrated MS-PhD student at IISER Thiruvananthapuram, in School of Chemistry. He completed PhD in 2020, working with Prof. Kana M. Sureshan. During PhD he worked on the synthesis of peptido- and carbohydrate-mimetics. He used topochemical polymerization strategy for the synthesis of peptidomimetics, and the conventional multi-step synthetic organic chemistry approach for the synthesis of carbohydrate-mimics. He also elucidated properties of these synthesized novel biomimetics in a material-chemistry and biological point of view. In 2021, he joined ASRC, CUNY (New York, USA) as a joined postdoctoral research associate with Prof. Rein Ulijn and Prof. Xi Chen. His work is focussed on development of chemo-mechanical peptide actuators by induced fit concept.

Publications

N. Berisha, A. Farahpour, M. Ramakrishnan, E. Sherman, R. V. Ulijn, D. A. Heller, M. Panagiotakopoulou, V. Athiyarath, M. Coste, Y. Marciano, E. Sherman, Directed discovery of high-loading nanoaggregates enabled by drug-matched oligo-peptide excipientsChem, 2025