Dr Arun Prasad Pandurangan appointed Extraordinary
Professor at the University of the Western Cape.

Dr Arun Prasad Pandurangan FCPS, FLS, FRSB, a Teaching Associate at Gonville & Caius College and formerly an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Cambridge, has been appointed extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. The appointment will be associated with the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI), based at UWC in Cape Town. SANBI is one of Africa’s leading centres for bioinformatics research and training, bringing together computational, biological and medical sciences to address questions of major relevance to health and society.

Dr Pandurangan’s work brings together computational biology, structural bioinformatics and genomics to study how biological molecules change, interact and contribute to health and disease. His research develops and applies artificial intelligence and machine-learning techniques, alongside computational modelling and large-scale biological data analysis, to interpret protein structure and function, genetic variation and molecular mechanisms.

This work has relevance to infectious disease, antimicrobial resistance and human health. His academic career has included research and academic appointments at the University of Cambridge, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology, jointly based at Birkbeck and UCL. These experiences have enabled him to work across structural biology, bioinformatics and computational research in several collaborative and interdisciplinary environments.

Dr Pandurangan said: “I am deeply grateful to the University of the Western Cape and SANBI for appointing me as an Extraordinary Professor. It is a real honour to be associated with an institute that has made such important contributions to bioinformatics research and training in South Africa.
“I very much look forward to working with researchers and students at SANBI and contributing, in whatever way I can, to the growth of bioinformatics and structural biology expertise in South Africa and across Africa. I hope the appointment will also help build meaningful scientific links that support biomedical discovery and create opportunities for the next generation of researchers.”

The UWC appointment forms part of a growing set of international academic collaborations for Dr Pandurangan. He has also recently been appointed Visiting Professor at Chanakya University, India; Visiting Scientist at ShanghaiTech University, China; and Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Protein Research, The University of Osaka, Japan.

Dr Pandurangan is an elected Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and Fellow of the Linnean Society of London.