Dr Dattatraya Ukale
Dattatraya (Datta) joined the Brown group in March 2024. He was born and raised in Ahlilyanagar- Pune, Maharashtra, India. He received a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the University of Pune, India, in Chemistry and Organic Chemistry respectively. After his master’s studies, he worked at Alkyl Amines Chemicals Ltd, University of Pune, and CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, India. He completed his Ph.D. from University of Turku, Finland (2017-2021) in chemical biology. His thesis focused on recognitions of single-and double stranded nucleic acids by covalently metalated oligonucleotides. After Ph.D. he moved to the University of Oxford (2021-2022) to work in Metal-mediated nucleic acid conjugation to drive fundamental methods in cellular analysis. Subsequently, he returned to Finland for further postdoctoral research at University of Jyvaskyla (2022-2024) where he worked on multiply-entangled de novo proteins. His research expertise includes nucleic acid chemistry, protein engineering, organic synthesis, and supramolecular chemistry. In the Brown group he is developing chemically reactive Mini-Oligonucleotides with artificial backbones for the therapeutic applications and is funded by a Finnish postdoc Pooli Research Fellowship.