BOSTON (TIP): New Chemical Engineering Professor Ashish Kulkarni of University of Massachusetts at Amherst recently has been included among the so-called “Talented 12”, an international “dream team” of rising all-stars in chemistry, as chosen by Chemical & Engineering News. Dr. Kulkarni’s baseball-card-style photo on the lively Talented 12 webpage nicknamed him the “Cancer Crusher.” He comes to UMass Amherst after serving as an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an associate bioengineer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Kulkarni’s research efforts have been focused on the development of pioneering, structure-activity, relationship-inspired nanomedicine for cancer therapy.

“Disease develops in our body if there is an imbalance in the immune system,” Kulkarni said in his Chemical & Engineering News profile. “I’m developing dual-function nanoparticles that can allow us not only to create a balance in the immune system but also to monitor whether the drug is working in real time.”

As Chemical & Engineering News explained its Talented 12: “This team of up-and-comers has big ideas for using chemistry to solve global problems. Welcome to the third annual Talented 12 issue. It took us months of scouring the globe to collect all 12 of the rising stars in chemistry featured here.”

As a postdoc at Harvard, he designed nanoparticles that could act as cancer immunotherapies; meaning drugs that prompt the immune system to find and attack cancer cells. But, although cancer immunotherapies known as “checkpoint inhibitors” dissipate tumors in many people with cancer, they don’t work for all. Researchers have been searching to find a good diagnostic or biomarker to predict and track people’s responses to the treatments.

The 36-year-old academic, who completed his undergraduate work at the Institute of Chemical Technology in India before earning his doctorate at the University of Cincinnati, grew up loving cricket. Kulkarni can include his addition to the Talented 12 super team on his list of distinguished awards. Among other honors, he is the recipient of the Hearst Foundation Young Investigator Award, Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Career Development Award, American Association of Cancer Research Scholar-in-training Award, American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics Young Scientist Award, and the Melanoma Research Alliance Young Investigator Award.