Meena Sakharkar
Associate Professor
University Of Saskatchewan
USA
Biography
Dr. Meena Sakharkar obtained her PhD from the National University of Singapore, followed by postdoctoral training at Stanford University on discordant introns and intronless genes in eukaryotic genomes. She was assistant professor with concurrent appointments as head, Pharmacogenomics and deputy director for the Advanced Design and Modeling Lab at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Before joining the University of Saskatchewan, Dr. Sakharkar was a professor at the Graduate School of Life and Environmental Science at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Dr. Sakharkar is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Saskatchewan. Dr. Sakharkar’s research interests are in drug target identification and validation using multiple cross-disciplinary approaches. Two research streams are pursued in her research program: The first one includes the design and development of novel drugs against pathogenic bacteria that can delay the development of resistance. Here, she is developing a framework for finding novel therapeutics for pathogenic bacteria by using techniques such as fragment based drug design. She aims to design and develop novel phytochemical based hybrid antimicrobial agents that can be safely administered to dairy cattle for treating mastitis. The second research stream is aimed at understanding the molecular mechanism of PPAR gamma action and incorporates establishment of the link PPAR gamma targets and its regulated pathways. PPAR gamma is a ligand activated transcription factor and has been shown to play a role in diabetes and cancer. Dr. Sakharkar has published more than 75 articles in peer reviewed international journals and has edited two books on genomics and drug discovery. Her research is currently funded by NSERC, ADF, Mitacs, SaskMilk and SHRF, Canada.
Research Interest
Pharmacogenomics