Prashant has been an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Bioengineering since 2014. The Mali laboratory is working in the fields of synthetic biology and regenerative medicine, with a long-term focus on developing tools for enabling gene and cell based human therapeutics. Towards this the research team is taking a multidisciplinary approach integrating its core expertise in genome engineering and stem cell biology with instrumentation and materials engineering. The Mali lab has been working on combinatorial CRISPR screens for genetic interactions mapping, including a paper published in Nature Methods in 2017.
He received a bachelor’s and master’s in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, with a research focus on biomedical sensors; and a doctorate in Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University, with a research focus on human pluripotent stem cell engineering. During his postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School (George Church lab), he pioneered the development of the CRISPR/Cas systems for eukaryotic genome engineering. For his graduate work he received the Siebel Scholar Award in 2011, and in 2014 he received the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award at the Scientific Interface.