DrSrinivasan Rengachari

I studied Biotechnology with a specialisation in plants at the Bharathidasan University in India, before completing my PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Graz, Austria. My doctoral research focused on lipid metabolism, with a particular emphasis on determining the structure-function relationship of monoglyceride lipases using X‑ray crystallography. After earning my PhD in 2012, I undertook postdoctoral training at EMBL Grenoble, France, where I investigated the activation of gene expression in response to viral infection through interferon signalling.

In 2018, I joined the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, Germany, to train in cryo‑electron microscopy, studying gene expression in eukaryotes as mediated by RNA polymerase II (Pol II).

From August 2025, I'm leading a research group within the Section for Structural and Synthetic Biology at Imperial College London. Our main interest is to understand how Pol II transcription is regulated as coupled to genome maintenance. We study how co‑transcriptional RNA processing, DNA repair processes and viral interference regulate gene expression and influence cellular and organismal fitness. By determining the structural basis of these processes, we aim to understand how their dysregulation causes infection, neurodegenerative diseases and cancer.