Pranesh Padmanabhan

Dr Pranesh Padmanabhan, an NHMRC Emerging Leadership (Level 2) Fellow and Senior Research Fellow, heads the Molecular and Systems Medicine Group at the School of Biomedical Sciences and Queensland Brain Institute. His group combines mathematical modelling and quantitative imaging techniques to uncover pathomechanisms of several infectious and neurodegenerative diseases, aiming to develop and optimise treatments.

Dr. Padmanabhan began his research career as a chemical engineering PhD student in Prof. Narendra Dixit’s lab at the Indian Institute of Science. He focused on hepatitis C virus infection, innate immunity, and treatment optimisation through mathematical modelling. He received the Kuloor Memorial Medal for the best PhD thesis. In 2015, he secured a competitive three-year University of Queensland postdoctoral fellowship, joining the Queensland Brain Institute to work with Profs. Geoffrey Goodhill, Frederic Meunier, and Jürgen Götz, integrating computational modelling and molecular imaging approaches to address basic and translation neuroscience problems.

Throughout his career, Dr. Padmanabhan has secured over $2.6M in grant funding as the lead chief investigator and published in top-ranking journals, including Nature Computational Science, Nature Aging, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Nature Reviews Neurology, Nature Communications, PNAS, EMBO Journal, Journal of Cell Biology, eLife, and PLoS Computational Biology.