Puja received her Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India in 2014. During her Ph.D, she worked on the design and synthesis of metal-based complexes and studied their photocytotoxic activity for Photodynamic Therapy (PDT) applications. In June 2014, she joined as a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Patrick J. Sinko’s group at the Department of Pharmaceutics, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA. There she worked on hydrogel-nanoparticle composite systems for drug delivery applications. Puja returned to India in 2015 and joined Dr. Shalini Gupta’s group at the Dept. of Chemical Engineering at IIT Delhi in January 2016. Her current work deals with the removal of endotoxin or lipopolysaccharides (LPS) from biological fluids. She is using gold-coated magnetite core/shell nanoparticles (Fe3O4/Au NPs) engineered with self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of long acyl chain thiolates to hydrophobically entrap and remove endotoxin molecules. She is also working on the detection of these hydrophobic nanoparticles using simple bioassay techniques.
References:
1. Prasad P., Sachan S., Suman S., Swyambhu G. and Gupta S., ‘Regenerative core-shell nanoparticles probes for simultaneous removal and detection of endotoxins‘, Langmuir, 34, 7396–7403 (2018)
