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Ajit Divakaruni is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on laboratory studies of energy metabolism and cellular substrate preference, emphasizing the balance between sugar, amino acid, and fatty acid oxidation to control cell function and fate. His interests center around mitochondria, which are the organelles chiefly responsible for energy transduction involved in biosynthesis, ion metal homeostasis, and signal transduction. Rather than targeting specific disease pathologies, his work explores the general mechanisms of metabolic control, integrating bioenergetics and analytical chemistry methods, such as metabolomics and 13C isotope tracing, along with live cell imaging to characterize mitochondrial metabolism in response to physiologically relevant stimuli and drug candidates. His current lab projects include understanding how inflammatory cytokines reprogram mitochondria, targeting mitochondrial metabolism to treat the aging brain, and developing new methods to study bioenergetic function.
Department of Economics admits primarily for the PhD program.