Prabakaran Ponraj, PhD, a senior research scientist, joined the Duke Human Vaccine Institute in October 2007. His major research areas include X-ray crystallography and bioinformatics for studying the structures and functions of biomolecules and their interactions. His present research is focused on the structure-based HIV vaccine development, antigen-antibody interactions and bioinformatics databases.

 

Praba received his PhD in Physics (1999) from Bharathidasan University, India. He received postdoctoral trainings in working with Akinori Sarai at RIKEN, Japan, Dimitrov and Xinhua groups of National Cancer Institute, NIH at Frederick. During his NIH fellowship, he determined an antibody complex structure of the receptor binding domain of the SARS virus envelope, and studied structural mechanisms of broadly neutralizing anti-HIV antibodies targeting the receptor binding sites.