Dr. Gajanan Kendre

About

Assistant Professor, Department of Life Science, National Institute of Technology Rourkela

Dr. Gajanan Kendre is a researcher and educator working at the intersection of molecular biology, cancer biology, and precision medicine. He trained at Hannover Medical School in Germany for over seven years, in an environment where clinicians and basic scientists worked closely together. That experience shaped his approach to research: start with a question that emerges from the clinic and trace it back to the molecular mechanisms underlying disease.

Since joining NIT Rourkela in 2023, he has established the Precision Medicine and Oncology Laboratory, which investigates cancer heterogeneity, therapeutic response, and resistance using molecular biology, genome editing, cancer models, and genomic approaches. A central question is why targeted therapies produce very different outcomes in different patients — and how to make those outcomes predictable rather than retrospective. The same question about biological context runs through the group’s other work: what makes one injured liver scar faster than another, and how bacteria and host cells read each other’s signals.

He teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Life Science and believes that mentorship is one of the most important parts of academic work. His goal is to help students develop the confidence to ask their own questions and think independently, rather than simply follow a protocol. His commitment to students has been recognised with the Best Faculty Advisor Award 2025.

Beyond research and teaching, he is a certified yoga instructor and serves as Co-Professor-in-Charge of Yoga and Natural Well-being at NIT Rourkela. He reads and writes poetry, particularly in Marathi, and has published a collection of his poems.