About

The College of Science and Mathematics is pleased to announce Madhavi Kakakia, Ph.D. as Department Chair of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Dr. Kadakia received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in microbiology from the University of Mumbai, and her Ph.D. in infectious diseases and microbiology from the University of Pittsburgh. After completing postdoctoral fellowships at the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, she came to Wright State in 1999. Dr. Kadakia is a professor in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology department at Wright State. Her research focuses on the identification of signaling pathways in cancer and development, in particular the p53 family of tumor suppressors and the vitamin D signaling pathway. She has been a member of the organizing committee for the International p63/p73 workshop for 2011 and 2013. 

Her work is funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health. In 2011 she was awarded a Visiting Research Scholar Fellowship at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, and was also a Visiting Scientist at the Medical Research Council in Leicester, UK.  In 2010, Dr. Kadakia received the Faculty Mentor Award for the Boonshoft School of Medicine.

She is currently the director of the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology master’s program. Dr. Kadakia played a key role in obtaining an instrumentation award from DURIP (Defense University Research Instrumentation Program) that brought a next generation sequencer to Wright State. This equipment, housed in a shared facility, supports basic and translational research across many disciplines. Dr. Kadakia is using the sequencer as part of a project to identify biomarkers that could differentiate stages of cancer with the ultimate goal of developing personalized patient treatment.