Prabhat Arya's Biography

Prabhat Arya, Professor and Head, Dr Reddy's Institute of Life Sciences

With an objective to moving beyond the traditional chemical space and to building a toolbox with small molecules that are more close to bioactive natural products, Dr Arya’s team is working in this area for nearly two decades. These compounds can be broadly defined as natural product-inspired and hybrid natural products. Over the years, his team has written several leading articles on the need to strengthen the advanced organic chemistry efforts to producing next generation small molecules to undertake challenging biological targets that are related to protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and, signaling pathways, in general. Dr Arya has trained more than 50 post-doctoral fellows, several graduate and undergraduate students on this topic and delivered 140 lectures at various scientific meetings and research institutions. During his academic tenure in Canada, he served on various NIH and CIHR and NCIC (Canada) grant panels and worked in the committees that were assigned the task of establishing large scale chemical biology research programs within US and Canada. Prior to making an adventurous move to India in July 2009, Dr Arya was a Research Officer (at various levels) at the National Research Council of Canada (NRCC) for nearly 20 years and had a brief stint at the Ontario Institute of Cancer Research help building the medicinal chemistry program. In addition, he was an Adjunct Professor at Biochemistry, McGill University, Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Ottawa and Ottawa Health Research Institute (OHRI).