Diwakar Shukla

Westwater Professorial Scholar
Associate Professor

(217) 300-0021

203 Roger Adams Laboratory

Uses and develops computational and experimental methods to understand biophysical processes for applications in plant biology and human diseases.

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Biography

Diwakar Shukla is an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also an affiliate faculty in the Center for Biophysics and Quantitative biology, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Department of Plant Biology and Department of Bioengineering. His research work is focused on understanding the complex biological processes using novel physics-based models and techniques. He started his research career at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, India, where he received B. Tech and M. Tech. degrees in chemical engineering. He then joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering for his work on solution biochemistry with Prof. Bernhardt Trout. Before joining Illinois, he worked with Prof. Vijay Pande at Stanford University on developing distributed computing approaches for understanding protein dynamics. Shukla has received numerous early-career faculty awards from the American Chemical Society, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. At Illinois, Shukla has been recognized for his research and teaching: he has been awarded the Dean’s Award for excellence in research (2020, 2024); named a Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) scholar; and earned the School of Chemical Sciences’ Teaching Excellence Award.

Education

Postdoctoral Fellow, Chemistry, Stanford University, 2011-2014
Ph.D., Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006-2011
M.S., Chemical Engineering Practice, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009
M.Tech., Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, 2006
B.Tech., Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, 2006

Research Interests

Molecular Engineering; Molecular Modeling and Simulations; Biophysics

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Selected Articles in Journals

B. Selvam, Z. Shamsi and D. Shukla. Universality of Sodium Ion Binding Mechanism in G-Protein-Coupled Receptors. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 57, 12, 3048-3053, 2018.
Balaji Selvam, Shriyaa Mittal and Diwakar Shukla. Free energy landscape of the complete transport cycle in a key bacterial transporter. ACS Central Science, Vol. 4, 9, 1146–1154, 2018.

Honors

Engineering Council Outstanding Advising Award, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2015)
List of Excellent Teachers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2016-2020)
New Innovator Award in Food & Agriculture Research, Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (2017)
NSF Early Career Award, National Science Foundation (2018)
OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty in Computational Chemistry, American Chemical Society (2018)
CoMSEF Young Investigator Award, American Institute of Chemical Engineers (2018)
Sloan Research Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2019)
Pivot Fellowship, Simons Foundation (2022)