Faculty

Sharad Ramanathan

Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics

Contact Information

Office:
Email: sharad@seas.harvard.edu
Office Phone: (617) 384-7852
Lab Room: Northwest Building 368

Websites

http://www.ramanathanbiophysics.seas.harvard.edu/
http://www.mcb.harvard.edu/Faculty/faculty_profile.php?f=sharad-ramanathan
http://www.lsdiv.harvard.edu/csb/ramanathan/Site1/Welcome.html

Education

MSc., Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
A.M., Physics, Harvard Univeristy
Ph.D., Chemical Physics, Harvard Univeristy

Research Interests

Marriage of Biological & Artificial Systems
  • Cell and Tissue Engineering and Biomaterials
Materials & Devices
  • Biophysics and Self-Assembly
  • Electromagnetics and Nanoelectronics
  • Materials Science
  • Surface and Interface Science

Profile

Sharad Ramanathan’s research is directed towards answering two questions. How do cells and organisms process signals from their environment to make decisions? How do the underlying circuits make this possible?

To answer these questions he uses a combination of computational, theoretical and experimental tools. Ramanathan’s experimental work has focuses on different organisms to uncover general principles that underlie decision making.

Ramanathan received his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from Harvard University and his and undergraduate degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Since 2000, he has been a member of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard (most recently as a Bauer Fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Science’s Center for Systems Biology) and has simultaneously served as a technical staff member at Bell Laboratories at Alcatel-Lucent.

Positions and Employment

Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology

  • Present: Assistant Professor of Applied Physics and of Molecular and Cellular Biology

Selected Publications

  • Hersen P., McClean M.N., Mahadevan L., Ramanathan, S., (2008) Signal Processing by the HOG MAP kinase pathway. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA May 14, 2008, 10.1073/pnas.0710770105
  • Hallatschek O., Hersen, P., Ramanathan, S., and Nelson, D. (2007) Genetic drift at expanding frontiers promotes gene segregation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 104 (50), 19926-30
  • Nachman,  I., Regev, A., and Ramanathan, S. (2007) Dissecting Timing Variability in Yeast  Meiosis. Cell 131, 544-556.
  • Ramanathan, S., and  Broach, J. (2007). Do cells think? Cell. Mol. Life Sci. 64, 1801-4 .
  • McClean,  M. N., Mody, A., Broach, J., and  Ramanathan, S. (2007). Decision Making in MAP Kinase  pathways. Nat. Genet. 39,  409-414.
  • Detwiler PB., Ramanathan, S., Sengupta, A., Shraiman BI. (2000). Engineering Aspects of Enzymatic Signal Transduction: Photoreceptors in the Retina. Biophys J, December 2000, p. 2801-2817, Vol. 79, No. 6.