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Professor and Chair
B.Tech: The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, 1976 MS: Pennsylvania State University, 1978 D.Eng.Sc: Columbia University, 1982
Room 331, Lindy Boggs Center
Phone: (504) 865-5883 |
I work in the highly interdisciplinary areas of lipid self-assembly, drug and vaccine delivery, and the development of nanostructured materials. The self-organization of amphiphilic molecules (such as biological lipids and synthetic surfactants) is essential in technologies as mundane as consumer detergent products and those of the future as in the development of structured, responsive nanomaterials. Biological membranes are ubiquitous examples of lipid-self assembly that impact the entire function of a cell. A major project that I am now working on is in the exploitation of lipid self-assembly to induce transcutaneous vaccine delivery. Vaccine development and needle free vaccine delivery is a grand challenge problem being addressed by researchers at the Medical School and at the Uptown Campus at Tulane, and I am privileged to be part of this group. Funding for my research comes from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency.
An entirely separate problem I am working on is the development of technologies based on clathrate hydrates. These are inclusion compounds of gas and water where the water molecules form cage-like structures to encapsulate gas molecules. They have tremendous implications in natural gas recovery, processing and storage. Together with colleagues at Tulane, Hamilton College and Los Alamos National Laboratories, we are trying to exploit novel clathrate systems for use in hydrogen storage for next generation fuel-efficient vehicles. This research is funded by the Department of Energy.
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