Assistant Professor in Computational Drug Design

Vibhu Jha has studied B. Pharm. from Chhattisgarh Swami Vivekananda Technical University (CSVTU), Bhilai, India (2008 – 2012). Vibhu undertook M. S. Pharm. (Medicinal Chemistry) from the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER), Raebareli, India (2013 – 2015). As a part of his masters dissertation, he spent one year at the CSIR – Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI), Lucknow, India, working on ‘In silico studies and synthesis of antidiabetic agents.’ Vibhu subsequently joined School of Pharmacy, ITM University, Gwalior, India as an Assistant Professor carrying out teaching and research activities at UG level (2015 – 2017). Vibhu obtained an international fully-funded PhD position at the Department of Pharmacy, University of Pisa, Italy and was awarded ‘Excellent honours’ (2017 – 2021). His PhD was focused on molecular modeling and virtual screening studies to identify new anticancer hit compounds, against druggable protein targets. In addition, Vibhu spent 6-months as a visiting PhD researcher at the Institute of Cancer Therapeutics (2019), gaining medicinal chemistry experience. Vibhu joined School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, UK, as a Researcher in Molecular Modeling, focussing on antitubercular and antimalarial drug discovery (2021 – 2022). Vibhu subsequently moved to the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden as a Postdoc (2022 – 2023), working on various anticancer drug discovery projects driven by the state-of-the-art computational modeling techniques, also including masters project supervision, and teaching. Vibhu joined Institute of Cancer Therapeutics as an Assistant Professor in Computational Biology and Drug Design. Vibhu utilizes conventional computational modeling tools such as docking, molecular dynamics, virtual screening etc along with the state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools to study protein – ligand, protein – protein , protein – DNA interactions, that further helps to develop small molecule inhibitors/modulators against various cancer types. Vibhu is an active collaborator with different research groups in Italy, Sweden, Germany and India.