“I am honoured to receive the King's Prize Fellowship, and the Professor Anthony Mellows medal. This award provides a platform to develop my research programme at King’s College London and advance my research on how temperature fluctuations influence RNA regulation in brain health and disease. This fellowship not only offers a great opportunity to expand my collaborative network within King’s but also enables me to prepare for bigger grant applications such as the Wellcome Trust Career Development Award and Royal Society Fellowship.”
Dr Deepak Khuperkar
25 July 2025
Dr Deepak Khuperkar awarded King's Prize Fellowship and Professor Anthony Mellows Medal
The King’s Prize Fellowship and Professor Anthony Mellows Medal will support Dr Khuperkar’s research on fundamental RNA regulation in health and neurodegeneration.
Dr Deepak Khuperkar, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the UK Dementia Research Institute at King’s and the Department of Basic and Clinical Neuroscience, has been awarded the prestigious King’s Fellowship Prize and Professor Anthony Mellows Medal. The award will support his research on how temperature fluctuations influence RNA regulation in brain health and disease.
Temperature rhythms are a fundamental but underexplored factor in brain biology. Controlled cooling of the human body, called therapeutic hypothermia, has demonstrated significant clinical benefits and is currently used to improve outcomes after stroke, cardiac arrest and neonatal brain injury. Despite these successes, the broader application of therapeutic hypothermia remains limited, largely due to a poor mechanistic understanding of how the human body, and particularly the brain, responds at the molecular level to temperature changes. Dr Khuperkar’s research aims to uncover how these thermal cues shape RNA regulation in different neuronal compartments during development and in neurodegenerative conditions by employing innovative tools that allow multi-scale exploration from single-molecule level to whole-brain function. By integrating molecular and systems-level approaches, this research aims to identify novel pathways for therapeutic intervention in neuroprotection.
During his Fellowship, Dr Khuperkar will work closely with King's researchers in the Department of Basic and Clinical Neuroscience including Professor Deepak Srivastava, Professor Jernej Ule (UK DRI at King’s) and Professor Marc-David Ruepp (UK DRI at King’s).
The Professor Anthony Mellows Medal and King’s Prize Fellowship is awarded annually to an outstanding post-doctoral scientist. The award aims to support the Fellow’s transition to become an independent researcher and to become a leader in their field. The award is supported by The Anthony and Elizabeth Mellows Charitable Settlement, in association with King’s College London, in the hope that it will extend the frontiers of research in the health sciences.