Biju Chandu, Ph.D.

Dr. Chandu is an Assistant Professor/Research in the Division of Infectious Diseases at UT Health San Antonio. He received his MSc in Biology from the University of Calicut, Kozhikode, India in 1997 and his PhD in Neuroscience from Nagpur University in Nagpur, India in 2004. He has over twenty years in the field of neuroscience and enjoys conducting innovative basic and translational research in the field of neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Chandu’s primary research goal is to develop a prodromal biomarker and a complementary disease-modifying therapeutic strategy for Parkinson’s disease. Our experimental approaches include the use of toxin-based mouse models, transgenic mouse models, and neuronal cell lines, in combination with rodent behavioral testing, multimodal MRI, molecular biology, biochemistry, and histological techniques, to examine various prodromal non-motor symptoms and their relationship to the fundamental neuropathology of the disease. We complement the mouse model and cell culture work with comparative analyses in postmortem human tissues from Parkinson’s patients.