Indrajit Srivastava, Ph.D.

Biography

Indrajit leads the Srivastava Lab in the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at Texas Tech University within the Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering. The Srivastava Lab develops advanced biomaterials inspired by nature and guided by nanoengineering design principles. Its research focuses on translating these innovations into diagnostic platforms and surgical interventions for diseases including cancer and cardiovascular disorders.

The lab is currently supported by multiple grants from the American Heart Association, including a Career Development Award to pioneer NIR-II hypoxia probes for diagnosing pulmonary embolism, and National Institute of Health (R35 MIRA) to develop NIR-II nanofluorophores for generalizable bioimaging across multiple disease contexts. Additional support comes from the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas to develop protein-complexed cyanine nanofluorophores for liver cancer surgery, and from the Robert A. Welch Foundation to investigate more fundamental insights into a “ping-pong” afterglow dynamics within self-assembled polymeric molecular cubes.

Some of the lab’s early work includes (i) the development of 3D tumor-mimicking phantom models for evaluating NIR-I/NIR-II imaging nanofluorophores under intraoperative conditions (A. Harun et al., ACS Nano), (ii) albumin-based organic polymer nanoprobes for NIR-I afterglow bioimaging (N. Bendele et al., Advanced Functional Materials), (iii) albumin-based ultrabright NIR-II-emitting nanoprobes for ex vivo bioimaging and pan-ovarian imaging across multiscale tumor models (I. Vasquez et al. ACS Nanoscience 2025 & I. Vasquez et al. bioRxiv 2026), (iv) reaction-encoded phenolic poly(acid) nanoparticles with architecture-dependent imaging stability, cellular uptake, and intrinsic redox-mediated therapeutic activity for fluorescence-guided ovarian cancer intervention (M. Megahed et al., ACS Nano Medicine 2026), and (v) biomineralized surface-enhanced Raman scattering nanotags that encode biomolecular identity into machine learning-resolvable plasmonic fingerprints (Md. H. Rashid et al., ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 2026).

Research Interests

• Targeted Delivery of Nanotherapeutics
• Multi-Modal Image-Guided Surgical Interventions for Cancer
• Nanosensors for Early Disease Diagnosis and Monitoring

Personal Information

Curriculum Vitae

Education

• Ph.D., Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2017-2020)
• M.S., Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2015-2017)
• B.E., Metallurgical Engineering & Materials Science, Indian Institute of Engineering Science & Technology, Shibpur, India (2011-2015)