Varun Khanna

Dr. Varun Khanna did his post graduation in 2006 with a degree in Bioinformatics from Chaudhary Charan Singh Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar, India. He then received his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia under the guidance of Professor Shoba Ranganathan.

After completing his Ph.D. in 2011, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Macquarie University where he was actively involved in the project aimed at analyzing occurrences and co-occurrences of molecular fragments in pharmaceutically important chemical compounds for advancing the knowledge in computational library design and ligand-based drug discovery.

He then moved to University of California, Riverside, USA for another post doctoral assignment. In UC Riverside he was involved in the chemogenomics, data mining project aimed at carrying out a comprehensive selectivity-centric analysis of ligand-target interactions in public activity profile databases such as ChEMBL, BindingDB and PubChem Bioassay.

Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at Institute of Life Sciences, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, India where he teaches Bioinformatics, Pharmaceutical biotechnology and Concepts in computing course to graduate and undergraduate students.

His current research interest includes developing novel techniques for computational drug design, chemogenomics, fragment based virtual screening, machine learning and developing android application for biological research.

Till date has authored several research papers in international peer reviewed journals and two book chapters.