Indian American researcher Dr. Ankur Singh is leading two major Georgia Tech research initiatives to develop new defenses against biological threats and treatments for difficult diseases.
A Georgia Tech-led team headed by Singh has received up to $6 million from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency to develop SHIELD, a platform designed to accelerate medical countermeasures against emerging viruses, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and other biological threats.
In another initiative announced in May, Singh and Georgia Tech researcher Andrés García received a $250,000 Georgia Research Alliance award to advance human antibody therapies. Their work seeks to develop antibodies against disease targets difficult to address using existing approaches, with potential applications in cancer, autoimmune diseases, and infectious illnesses.
Singh is the Carl Ring Family Professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and has a joint appointment in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. He also directs Georgia Tech’s Center for Immunoengineering.
His research combines engineering and immunology to develop human immune tissues and technologies to understand disease and develop new therapies, particularly for cancer, infectious diseases, and immune disorders.
Singh earned his B.Tech. from Kumaun University in India and his M.Tech. in biomedical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay before earning his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He completed postdoctoral training at Georgia Tech and later joined Cornell University, where he became a tenured associate professor, before returning to Georgia Tech.
A Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, Singh has received numerous honors, including an NSF CAREER Award, the Society for Biomaterials Mid-Career Award and Young Investigator Award, a Department of Defense Career Development Award, and teaching and research awards from Georgia Tech and Cornell University.