I am a King's Prize Fellow and Professor Anthony Mellows Medallist in the Department of Basic and Clinical Neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), where I am developing an interdisciplinary research programme investigating how temperature regulates RNA biology in the brain. 

My research asks how neurons adapt to changes in temperature and whether these adaptive mechanisms can be harnessed to promote resilience in ageing, following brain injury and in neurodegenerative diseases. To address this, I integrate single-molecule imaging technologies and computational analysis pipelines with multi-scale approaches spanning molecular, cellular and systems neuroscience to uncover temperature-responsive RNA networks in the brain. 

By building a comprehensive map of the neuronal cold-shock response, I aim to uncover new principles of neuronal adaptation and identify endogenous protective pathways that can be harnessed therapeutically, helping establish neuronal thermobiology as a new framework for understanding brain ageing and resilience.

Please see my Research Profile and Google Scholar Profile for more details.

Key publications

• Lin JQ*, Khuperkar D*, et al., 2023. HNRNPH1 regulates the neuroprotective cold-shock protein RBM3 expression through poison exon exclusion. EMBO.
• Khuperkar D., et al. 2020. Quantification of mRNA translation in live cells using single-molecule imaging. Nature Protocols.
• Boersma S*, Khuperkar D*, et al., 2019. Multi-color single-molecule imaging uncovers extensive heterogeneity in mRNA decoding. Cell.
• Hoek TA*, Khuperkar D*, et al., 2019. Single molecule imaging uncovers rules governing nonsense-mediated mRNA decay. Molecular Cell. 
• Wu J et al., 2019. Live imaging of mRNA using RNA-stabilized fluorogenic proteins. Nature Methods.

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