Pallabi Pal

Biography

Pallabi Pal, Ph.D., is a Project Scientist in the Pediatric Department at the University of California Irvine. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Medical Science and Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, where her dissertation focused on developing a dermal extracellular matrix mimicking bilayered bioactive nanofibrous scaffold for wound healing. Her research spans drug delivery systems, tissue engineering, and disease modeling, with particular emphasis on developing biomaterial scaffolds and three-dimensional cell culture models.

Pal's research has addressed multiple areas of regenerative medicine and therapeutic development. Her work includes the development of collagen-elastin-like polypeptide hydrogels for bone regeneration, three-dimensional adipocyte spheroid models for testing obesity-controlling drugs, and high-throughput screening methods for identifying small molecule inhibitors of protein-protein interactions. She has also investigated the use of fluorescence polarization-based assays in 384-well formats for drug discovery applications.

At the University of California Irvine, Pal focuses on genetic myopathies, including rimmed vacuolar myopathy caused by mutations in the HSPB8 gene and VCP-associated diseases. Her current work involves testing antisense oligonucleotides for allele silencing in VCP disease and glycogen synthase targeting in Pompe disease mouse models, as well as evaluating myotropic adeno-associated viruses for muscle-directed gene therapy delivery. She has authored over 35 peer-reviewed publications and holds an Indian patent for nanofibrous wound dressing technology.

Education

• Ph.D. in Medical Science and Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, 2017
• M.Sc. in Molecular Biology, West Bengal University of Technology, 2010
• B.Sc. in Genetics, University of Kalyani, 2008

Distinctions

• Rudolf Cimdins Award, European Society of Biomaterials, 2015
• Best poster award, School of Graduate Studies, University of Mississippi Medical Center, 2018