Nikhil Jain is a Birmingham Fellow working across the Institutes of Inflammation and Ageing, and the School of Chemical Engineering. Nikhil is a cell engineer who specializes in mechanobiology and developing novel bioengineering tools and techniques and combining them with cutting-edge epi-imaging, and advanced “omics” to tackle challenging questions in human health. 

Research in Nikhil’s lab (Mechano-theranostics lab (MeTL)) is at the interface of engineering, cell mechanics, and medicine and mainly focuses on applying fundamental mechanobiology-based principles to better understand human ageing and age-associated inflammatory diseases. The long-term goal is to couple changes in mechanical properties of aged cells with altered nuclear mechano-epigenomics programs to uncover novel mechano-signaling pathways to treat age-associated inflammatory diseases. The lab also focuses on developing new engineering techniques to develop bioengineered devices to better diagnose age-associated inflammatory diseases at the single-cell level.