School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
School of Biological Sciences
Ocean Science and Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

Diversity, inclusion, equity 

We commit to fair, respectful, and equal interactions in the lab and in the classroom. We are a lab with many nationalities, ethnicities, thoughts, and beliefs- this diversity is important to us.

Our Science

A majority of antibiotics and drugs that we use in the clinic are derived or inspired from small organic molecules called Natural Products that are produced by living organisms such as bacteria, fungi, and plants. Natural Products are at the forefront of fighting the global epidemic of antibiotic resistant pathogens, and keeping the inventory of clinically applicable pharmaceuticals stocked up. Some Natural Products are also potent human toxins and pollutants, and we need to understand how these toxins are produced to minimize our and the environmental exposure to them.

We as biochemists ask some simple questions- how and why are Natural Products produced in Nature, what we can learn from Natural Product biosynthetic processes, and how we can exploit Nature's synthetic capabilities for interesting applications? Find out more about our Science, browse the Publications, and meet The Team.
Broadly, we are interested in questions involving (meta)genomics, biochemistry, structural and mechanistic enzymology, mass spectrometry, analytical chemistry, and how natural product chemistry dictates biology.

News

June 2021 Luna PUBLISHES in JACS. Discovery of a peptidyl brominase in exceptionally abundant RiPP BGCs in marine sponge microbiomes. Collaboration with Eric.

June 2021 Ipsita and Luna PUBLISH in ChemBioChem. Enzymatic synthesis assisted discovery and sequencing of peptidic natural products from marine sponges.

June 2021 $$$s. The lab is awarded the NIGMS MIRA.

May 2021 Dongqi PUBLISHES in JACS in collaboration with JC and Will.

April 2021 Nadine is awarded the Georgia Tech President's Undergraduate Research Award. Nadine will be spending her summer in the lab isolating molecules from marine sponges and running antibacterial assays. Congratulations Nadine!

February 2021 Ipsita and Subhasish PUBLISH in mSystems. Sponges united by natural product chemistry can have very different microbiomes. Data from Atlantic and Pacific sponges.

February 2021 $$$s. Vinny is awarded the 2021 Cottrell Scholar Award in chemistry. Thanks RCSA!

February 2021 Scary, but everyone is safe. Thanks to Georgia Tech surveillance testing, getting a +ve/-ve test takes about a day. Executing smart quarantines and getting out of them is easier.

February 2021 Multiple COVID cases reported in our building. Powering down, getting tested, and coming back after a deep clean. Gotta stay safe.

January 2021 Kicking off the new year with Hem's paper describing how marine cyanobacteria make ozone-damaging bromoform accepted in J Phycology.

December 2020 Happy to welcome new students to the lab. Welcome Ashley, Brendan, and Dev.

October 2020 Subhasish joins the team. Molecules will be made.

July 2020 Funding $$$!! NSF funds our collaborative research proposal with JC and Eric. Commencing countdown, engines on...

July 2020 Ipsita and Dongqi PUBLISH in ACS Chemical Biology. Did we talk about how awesome the mass spec core at Georgia Tech is? Fortunate to have access to these top of the line mass specs.

July 2020 Hem heads over to the CDC to start his new position. Bummed to see him go, though we are glad he will be around in Atlanta still. To greater and better things.

July 2020 Vinny is awarded the Blanchard Assistant Professorship by GT School of Chem and Biochem. Aww, thanks y'all.

May 2020 Hem and Dongqi PUBLISH! The bromoform paper is accepted at ACS Chem Biol. Learning about seaweeds. So exciting to have new systems to work with. Thanks Eric and Jen and so many others who helped us.

March 2020 Research activities have ceased and we have shut down the lab as we minimize person-to-person contact to contain the virus. Instruments are resting. Feels weird to close down the lab, unsettling. Hope we all come out of this well.

February 2020 Ipsita PUBLISHES! 17 days from initial submission to acceptance, got to be some kind of record. Or is it the length of the SI file?

January 2020 Welcome back to the lab Sarah Pennebaker. Sarah is a Stamps Fellow at Georgia Tech and will be doing undergraduate research with Hem.

October 2019 Ipsita won the second prize for her oral presentation describing natural product metabolomes of marine sponges at the GT Chemistry graduate student retreat. Go Ipsita!!

October 2019 HPLC is installed and has been christened "Yoda". We are back and stable now.

September 2019 Our new HPLC is here (with the fraction collector) but we are having to wait a month before it is installed. The wait is killing us and making us unstable.

September 2019 Hem talks about his work at the Georgia Tech postdoctoral research symposium. Go Hem!

September 2019 Vinny is awarded the Harold Nation young faculty award at Georgia Tech. Thank you judges.

August 2019 Our paper describing the complex metabolome of a marine sponge is now online.

July 2019 Ipsita passes her candidacy exam in fine style. Congratulations Ipsita!

July 2019 Owen Glogovsky and Anusha Jain head back to Lipscomb and UGA after their summer REU and volunteer internships in the lab. Best of luck Owen and Anusha.

July 2019 We are awarded a Petit Institute seed grant with Shu Takayama. Time to learn engineering.

May 2019 Andrew graduates and moves to Knoxville for research for a year. Good luck Andrew!

March 2019 Our review on marine sponge microbiology and natural products with Val Paul and Chris Freeman is online.

January 2019 We are excited to welcome Hassaan Asif, Sarah Pennebaker, and Bryce Smith for undergraduate research in the lab.

January 2019 A Happy New Year to Hem and the team with a paper accepted in ACS Biochemistry. Congratulations Hem.

October 2018 Chemistry graduate students Luna and Dongqi join the lab.

August 2018 We're excited to welcome Michelle Kim to the lab. Michelle is a high school senior who will be interning in the lab.

June 2018 Andrew is awarded the Georgia Tech PURA. Congrats Andrew!

May 2018 A warm welcome to James Bailey from Xavier U as a summer REU student.

April 2018 Hem heads to Solomon Islands for sample collection trip. Thanks Eric for hosting us..

Vinayak Agarwal

Vinny got his PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with Satish Nair. He then moved to University of California, San Diego to work with Brad Moore. He was the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation fellow from 2014-2106, and the NIH K99 Pathway to Independence fellow from 2016-2017.

​The lab has received external funding from the NIH (NIEHS and NIGMS), NSF (MPS-CHE and BIO-MCB), Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Cottrell Scholar program. 

Gallery

Location

We are housed in the
Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience
Georgia Institute of Technology

315 Ferst Dr NW, Atlanta, GA 30332
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