Dr. Pravindra Kumar (born March 1, 1973) is a structural biologist who has made original contributions in the fields of Bioremediation, Structure based drug design, Protein engineering and X-ray crystallography. He has played an active role in the research projects on biodegradation of toxic aromatic compounds and structural biology in drug resistance in India and abroad. He has published more than 65 research papers in leading international journals. He has been awarded the Dr. S.V. Talekar Gold Medal as a best post graduate award of Biophysics from All India Institute of Medical Sciences (2001). He has also been awarded the fellowship from CSIR (1999) and young scientist BOYSCAST award in 2008. Dr. Kumar obtained his Masters in Physics in first Division from the CCS University of Meerut. He started his research career in 1996 as a graduate student at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi. He obtained his Ph. D degree in 2001 working on three dimensional structure determination of Lactoferrin. During his Ph.D., he worked as a senior demonstrator for three years in the Dept. of Biophysics, AIIMS. Soon after obtaining his Ph. D degree, he worked about four and half years (2001-2005) as a Post Doctoral Research fellow in the USA at Purdue University, West Lafayette-Indiana. After his return to India he worked as an Assistant Professor (2005-2012) and an Associate Professor (2012-15) in the Department of Biotechnology at I.I.T. Roorkee, where he established a Macromolecular Crystallographic Unit for structure based drug discovery. After establishing his own research group in the Department of Biotechnology, IIT Roorkee, Dr. Kumar and his group has made significant contribution towards the degradation of persisted pollutants using structure and functional studies of biphenyl degrading pathway enzymes. He has worked on plant therapeutic proteins and also developing inhibitors against some of the drug target proteins, which could be potential drugs. His publications have more than 740 citations with H-index of 14.
