Dr. Vipin Agarwal

Understanding the world around us involves deciphering the behaviour of molecules and their interaction with each other. Through advancement in science and technology, we continue to discover new properties and behaviour of molecules, leading to new insights and applications in fields such as medicine, material sciences, etc. Spectroscopy provides a means to understand molecules in terms of the structure, chemical composition and physical properties. Solid-state NMR spectroscopy is a versatile technique used to study the structure and dynamics of both biological and chemical systems. We work in the area of development of solid-state NMR methods and then subsequent application of these methods to address problems in structural biology, industrial pharmaceuticals, biologics, understanding  motions in proteins or characterization of materials at atomic resolution.

Some of the projects we have been engaged with are:

1. Structural characterization of oligomers, intermediates species and fibril polymorphs of α-synuclein implicated in Parkinson’s disease
2. Structural characterization of p53 fibrils implicated in ~50% of human cancers.
3. Understanding pseudopolymorphism in commercially available active pharmaceutical ingredients by combining NMR, diffraction and computational approaches.
4. Solid-state NMR methods involving theoretical and computational spin physics of novel recoupling and decoupling strategies, quantifying interactions in homogenously coupled spin-systems, efficient multiple quantum coherence excitation and reconversion, etc.