Image: Dr. Natarajan Kannan, from the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and the Institute of Bioinformatics, was a recipient of this year’s award, which recognizes an established investigator whose research/creative accomplishments at UGA and overall scholarly body of work have had a major impact on the field of study and have established the investigator’s international reputation as a leader in the field. Dr. Kannan has developed and applied sophisticated statistical and computational tools to map the complex relationships connecting sequence, structure, function and regulation in large families of protein kinases, and more recently has developed powerful informatics tools and deep learning models for the classification and evolutionary analysis of the large family of glycosyltransferase enzymes. He leverages new information about these proteins from different cell, tissue, disease types and organisms to develop predictions about how they propagate signals in diseases, and pursues biochemical validation of his predictions.
