Dr. Karthik Shekhar

Biography

Karthik Shekhar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He initiated his research group in 2020 after earning his undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from MIT. Following his doctoral studies, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship focusing on neuroscience, where he was instrumental in the early application of single-cell genomic approaches to study neural diversity at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His current research focuses on understanding the development and evolution of cell types in the visual system, particularly in the retina. Shekhar has received prestigious accolades such as the NIH Pathway Independence Award and the Hellmann Foundation Fellowship, along with being a fellow of the Glaucoma Research Foundation. His work explores the neural diversity present in the retina, the neural tissue responsible for visual processing, and aims to identify how these cell types evolve in different species based on their visual needs. He utilizes single-cell genomic profiles to assess the conservation of retinal cell types across species and to gain insights into the evolutionary underpinnings of neural diversity, particularly in terms of pathogenesis in blinding diseases.

Research Interests

Experience

Awards