Wright State names Madhavi Kadakia professor and chair of Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Madhavi P. Kadakia has been appointed chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Madhavi P. Kadakia, Ph.D., has been appointed chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, effective Jan. 1, 2015.

Kadakia currently serves as a full professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, associate director of the Center for Genomics Research and director of the master’s program within the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She has been with Wright State University since 1999.

She attained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in microbiology from the University of Mumbai. After receiving her Ph.D. in infectious diseases and microbiology from the University of Pittsburgh, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and later conducted research at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey.

At Wright State, she was awarded the Faculty Mentor Award in 2010 from the Boonshoft School of Medicine. In 2011, Kadakia served as a visiting research scholar at Nottingham University and the Leicester Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom. She has served as an organizing member on the International p63/p73 Workshops.

Her research, funded by the National Cancer Institute, focuses on identification of signaling pathways that play a role on cancer and development. The second area of focus in her laboratory has been to identify biomarkers that can help differentiate different stages of cancer that may eventually lead to personalized patient care.