Diwakar Shukla, Ph.D.

Diwakar Shukla is an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is also an affiliate faculty member in the Center for Biophysics and Quantitative Biology, Plant Biology and Bioengineering. His research work focuses on understanding biological processes using physics-based models and techniques.

Through his new fellowship, Shukla will pivot to experimental plant biology from computational chemistry. During this work, he will bring the disciplines of computational chemistry and experimental plant biology under one roof to enable rapid cycles of design and innovation in plant protein engineering. With mentoring from Stephen Long of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he will develop a framework for integrating ideas from machine learning to guided protein engineering, experimental plant biology and design validation in living plant tissues. The training phase’s overall goal is to demonstrate these synergistic approaches on a problem of high agricultural significance.