Mahesh Uttamchandani

Mahesh's Biography

Mahesh Uttamchandani is the Deputy Director of the Combat Protection and Performance Programme at the Defence Medical and Environmental Research Institute, DSO National Laboratories, Singapore. He earned his Ph.D. at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2007, following a B.Sc (Hons) in Microbiology in 2004. He also serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Departments of Chemistry and Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, and the University Scholars Programme, NUS.

Mahesh has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles in international journals, 11 book chapters and has edited two books on Small Molecule Microarrays. He has been cited over 2000 times and has a h-index of 29. He serves as a peer reviewer for many journals in the areas of peptide, protein and small molecule microarrays, high-throughput screening and rapid genotyping technologies.

Mahesh teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in medicinal chemistry and molecular biology at NUS. He is a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Temasek Society.

Mahesh has won the A*STAR/SNAS Young Scientist Award, the Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan competition, the Wang Gungwu Medal and Prize and the Sung Kah Kay memorial prize for his entrepreneurial and scientific achievements. He co-organized the annual Singapore Junior Chemistry Olympiad over 2010-2013. He served as the Vice-Chairperson of the Royal Society of Chemistry: Singapore Section from 2014-2015.

Research Interests

There are four broad areas that we are interested in, namely:

1) Proteomics/ Functional Genomics

• Novel strategies in developing small molecule, peptide and protein microarrays for high-throughput applications
• Developing tools for large-scale proteomics
• High-throughput enzyme screening systems
• Kinase, protease and phosphatase profiling

2) Peptide and Protein Engineering

• Solid phase peptide synthesis
• Combinatorial chemistry
• Ribosome/Phage display

3) High-Throughput Genotyping

• Developing strategies to rapidly profile multiple single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)
• Developing genotyping platforms on microarrays and bead-arrays.

4) Human Disease Genetics

• Studying polymorphisms that predispose individuals to hypertension, obesity and cardiovascular disorders
• Investigating genetic causes of sudden cardiac deaths