Speakers
Akaash Kumar
Akaash is a recent Post-Doctoral Scientist in the Cell Biology Division at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. A biochemical engineer by trade, he is interested in developing technology to help solve biological problems, often relying on interdisciplinary expertise from engineering and physics. As part of his PhD, at the University of Cambridge and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, he developed novel multispectral, video-rate fluorescence microscopy hardware and software which can improve any camera-based fluorescence microscope globally. He is applying this technology to study the mechanisms of endosomal sorting and trafficking more broadly within mammalian cells.
Akaash has been awarded a PhD Award by the Cambridge Society for the Application of Research in recognition for the impact of his PhD work and he has presented his research both nationally and internationally, having recently won Best Talk Awards at the Warwick-Cambridge Quantitative Cell Biology Symposium 2024 and RMS Frontiers in Bioimaging 2022. He is also an inventor on the patent application describing his PhD work and the technology is currently undergoing commercialisation with a major microscopy company.
Prior to his PhD, Akaash worked at the Wallace H. Coulter Dept. of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. Whilst there he developed novel bioprocessing technology for stem cell manufacturing and had a significant role in undergraduate/graduate-level teaching. He has also received an MSc in Advanced Chemical Engineering with Biotechnology from Imperial College London and a BEng in Biochemical Engineering from University College London.