Ananthan Sadagopan

About Ananthan Sadagopan

Ananthan Sadagopan grew up in Westborough, Massachusetts as the child of immigrants from Chennai, India. Growing up, his parents immersed him in culture, teaching him Tamil, the Vedas, mridangam, and emphasizing the importance of education.

Ananthan participated in chemistry competitions growing up, winning the You Be the Chemist Challenge in middle school and earning a gold medal at the International Chemistry Olympiad for the US in high school. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for college, graduating in three years with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology.

Throughout undergrad he worked with Srinivas Viswanathan on computational biology projects and with William Gibson, Matthew Meyerson, and Stuart Schreiber on chemical biology projects. He led projects characterizing somatic perturbations of X chromosome inactivation in cancer, developing a machine learning tool for cancer dependency prediction, using small molecules to relocalize proteins in cells, and creating a generalizable strategy to drug the most mutated gene in cancer, TP53. His work has been patented and published in journals such as Cell and Nature Chemical Biology.

Ananthan is currently pursuing a PhD in biological and biomedical science at Harvard University as a Hertz and Herchel Smith fellow, co-mentored by William Gibson and Benjamin Ebert. He is interested in de-risking new therapeutic strategies and hopes that his work will inspire pharma companies to bring first-in-class therapies to patients.

He is also committed to mentorship; throughout his undergraduate experience he was co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Leadership Training Institute, president of the chemistry undergraduate association, and led the events committee for MIT Science Olympiad. He continues to mentor undergraduates in the lab during his PhD.