Dr. Monika Sharma

UG Program Chair, Biological Systems Engineering (BSE)


Associate Professor, Plaksha University



Area of Expertise

Computational Biophysics, Bioinformatics


Research Interests

  • Molecular Simulations
  • Essential Dynamics
  • Free Energy Calculations
  • Membrane Transporters Modeling
  • Computer Assisted Drug Designing
  • Computational Biology/ Chemistry
  • Bioinformatics
  • Network Analysis

Education

  • Ph.D. in Computational Natural Sciences, IIIT Hyderabad, India

Past Associations

  • SERB Research Scientist and INSPIRE Faculty, Chemical Science, IISER Mohali
  • Postdoctoral Fellow, NINDS, National Institute of Health (NIH), Bethesda
  • Postdoctoral Fellow, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Michigan State University
  • DAAD Fellow, Max Planck Institute of Biophysical Chemistry

Bio

Dr. Sharma's research interests include the application of computational methods to understand the biological processes, especially those that have their keys residing in conformational dynamics. Her work is at the interface of Chemistry (understanding interactions), Physics (defining rules), Mathematics (integrators, statistical analyses), and Computer Science (extracting, analyzing and making sense of data). She has keen interests in the integration of deep learning with the exploration of conformational dynamics to identify the characteristics that may point to underlying disrupted biological mechanisms and may be amenable to treatment with a resultant increase in survival and thus facilitate clinical decision making. Her vision for the future is to be able to create a world-class premier research environment where she can translate basic research into biomedical research that will impact society as well as the healthcare industry.