Arun Maji, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Dr. Arun Maji (he/him/his) is a synthetic chemist with specialized expertise in drug design and development, particularly for treating infectious diseases. 

He received his Ph.D. in synthetic chemistry in 2018 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B), under the mentorship of Prof. Debabrata Maiti. His doctoral research focused on developing reusable directing templates for remote C–H functionalizations, which facilitated the transformation of feedstock chemicals into challenging pharmacophores.

As a Beckman-Brown postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Martin D. Burke’s lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Dr. Maji expanded his expertise into antifungal drug discovery. His work was guided by structural understanding, computational modeling, biophysical studies, and both in vitro and in vivo pharmacological and toxicological profiling. He elucidated the mechanism of toxicity for the clinically vital but highly toxic antifungal drug Amphotericin B. This research led to the discovery of AM-2-19_DP2K (SF001), a next-generation renal-sparing, resistance-evasive antifungal effective against several life-threatening invasive fungal infections.

In his current research, Dr. Maji aims to design modular small molecule therapeutics that can engage the immune system for fast-acting and long-lasting defense against immune-evasive threats, including opportunistic fungal pathogens.

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