Dr. Prashant Rajbhandari's laboratory uses molecular biology, biochemistry, and genomic science to study lipid metabolism and fat biology. Dr. Rajbhandari completed his doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he elucidated how structural changes in the unstructured region of Estrogen Receptor-alpha increase its ligand-independent transcriptional function to promote drug resistance in breast cancer. An intriguing relationship between metabolism and cancer led him to pursue postdoctoral studies in the Lab of Dr. Peter Tontonoz, MD, PhD in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA). At UCLA, his interests broadly focused on understanding lipid metabolism, particularly in adipose tissues, and how it affects adipocytes and hepatic and cardiovascular function. He discovered immune-adipocyte crosstalk in the adipose microenvironment that limits mitochondrial respiration, energy expenditure, and lipid mobilization and blocks the adipose tissue's thermogenic transcriptional program. He pioneered using snRNA-seq to study mature adipocyte heterogeneity and mammary duct and adipocyte crosstalk. His works are published in Nature,  Cell, Nature Medicine, Nature Metabolism, Journal of Clinical Investigation, eLIFE, Cell Metabolism, and Nature Chemical Biology. The NIH has recognized his work as meritorious: he received an NRSA F32 individual postdoctoral grant, the prestigious K99/R00 Transition to Independence Award, and recently, R01 and NIH Director Pioneer Award grants to support his work from NIDDK. His lab in DOMI at Mt. Sinai focuses on identifying and studying novel factors that control fat biology using a combination of genetics, cell biology, biochemistry, and Next-Gen sequencing.