Dr. Kolatkar graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1991 where he studied structural biology in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. He then spent several years studying structural biology in the laboratory of Michael Rossmann at Purdue University where he studied virus-receptor relationships and received a Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund fellowship. Upon moving to Singapore in 1997, he worked for the Bioinformatics Center and Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology and joined the Genome Institute of Singapore in 2001. His current work involves understanding the molecular details of transcription factor (TF) complexes involved in stem cell biology, especially in relation to pancreatic development. His laboratory uses biochemistry as well as structural biology to discover how TFs create function through combinatorial interactions.

Dr Kolatkar’s current work is a continuation of his past work dealing with TFs involved in pluripotency and their combinatorial code, it also investigates TFs involved in various diabetes pathways such as β islet cell development. His laboratory will use a variety of methods including X-ray crystallography as well as various macromolecular interaction methods such as ITC and EMSA to analyze protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions.