Thirumurugan Prakasam
Research Scientist
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: PhD in Organic Chemistry, CSIR-CLRI, MPhil, MSc Chemistry and BSc Chemistry, University of Madras
Thirumurugan Prakasam was born and raised in Tirupattur (Tamilnadu), India. He studied BSc and MSc Chemistry at the University of Madras, Chennai, India and also he earned the MPhil degree in Organic Chemistry from the University of Madras, Chennai in 2004. He received his PhD degree in Synthetic Organic Chemistry in 2010 from CSIR-CLRI, Chennai, India. After completion of his doctoral degree, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oklahoma and Medical University of Lublin for two years. Currently, he is working as a research scientist at NYUAD for the past eight years.
Thiru worked at the interface of synthetic chemistry, spectroscopy, and medicinal chemistry during his PhD and earlier post-doctoral studies. His current research focus is on the synthesis of metal-organic non-trivial structures such as [2]catenane, Solomon knot, Trefoil knot, etc. using metal-template directed multi-step synthesis and application development in the six potential directions such as (i) anion binding, sensing and transport (ii) catalysis, (iii) protein-protein interactions inhibition, (iv) anti-cancer agents and MRI contrast agents for imaging, (v) photo-switchable molecular nanomachines, and (vi) explore the physical and chemical properties of the extended molecular knotted structure.
Another aspect of his research is to make functional building block units for making COFs and extended polymeric network structures for environmental and stimuli-responsive molecular machine applications.