My Education...

I don't think I was very naughty...:-) Anyway, I was forced to start my education one year early to whatever is normal at my place. I have heard that my parents, especially my eldest brother had a tough time to make me sit in the class during the first year of my formal education. However, once introduced, I started enjoying the learning process and still enjoy it. Thanks to those good teachers of my village schools...

I did my schooling at Govt. Lower Primary School, TDP yogam Upper Primary School (which was our ambala-school; school was associated with an `ambalam'(Temple), and the temple was an integral part of all its activities) and Govt. High School, Pullut. All of them at walkable distances from my home.

After my 10^th, I joined the science stream at Christ College, Irinjalakuda, Thrissur, from where I was awarded a graduate degree in Chemistry. I then moved to the School of Chemical Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, for my post graduation in Organic Chemistry. I joined the research programme at the Department of Organic Chemistry, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 1997 under the guidance of Prof. Santanu Bhattacharya to walk toward my Ph. D. There I spent six years of my life breaking my head (and in the mean time loosing n number of hairs on my head!) on cationic lipid-mediated gene delivery to mammalian cell lines :-). I submitted my doctoral thesis titled "Lipids bearing oxyethylene units: Synthesis, Membrane Forming Properties and Biological Activities" on April 21^st, 2003. I could successfully defend my thesis on 11^th October, 2003 (It was a Saturday!) in front of a supporting audience (thanks to my labmates) and a really aggresive (and very good) examiner. I really enjoyed my thesis defence....After my doctorate, I decided to continue my studies on gene transfection and its therapeutic applications and so joined the research lab of Prof. Leaf Huang at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.

My Doctoral Research...

For quiet sometime, my lab was involved in deciphering the structure-function relationships of synthetic lipid formulations, concentrating mainly at the linkage region between the polar head group and the hydrophobic tail of a lipid molecule. I was interested to find out the changes occurring in lipid aggregation and their subsequent properties on introducing more and more hydrophilicity at the linkage region. Thus, I started my research carrier synthesizing lipids having varying hydrophilicty at the linkage region, to find out any possible correlation between the hydrophilicity of a lipid and its properties.

I found my interests expanding when I happened to realize the marvels of biosciences during my stay at IISc. So, I was very happy when I got an opportunity to study the possible applications of some of my synthetic lipids as DNA delivery agents in mammalian cells. Thus for almost one and half years I worked in a collaborative project with Prof. A. Antony, of Dept of Microbiology and Cell biology toward the development of better liposomal transfection agents and also to understand their mechanism of action. It was fun seeing cell biology through an Organic Chemist's eye.

My Publications...

If you want to know exactly what I am doing, you can go thru these two small papers.

(1) Santanu Bhattacharya and Dileep P.V. Tetrahedron Letters, Vol. 40, 1999, pp. 8167-8170. See the pdf version here
(2) Dileep P.V., Antony A. and Santanu Bhattacharya Febs Letters, Vol. 509, Issue 2, 2001, pp. 327-331. See the pdf version here

If you want to read more about my research area, here are some of the references that I have collected during my Ph. D.

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