Devika S Manickam is an Assistant Professor at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, USA. She received her undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering in India. She completed her graduate training under the mentorship of Prof. David Oupický in the area of redox-responsive polyplex gene delivery. She received her MSc and PhD degrees in Pharmaceutical Sciences at Wayne State University in 2005 and 2008, respectively. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship on protein delivery under the mentorship of Prof. Alexander Kabanov at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. She started her faculty career in 2012 as a Research Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) in 2012. She started her tenure-track, teacher-scholar position in the School of Pharmacy at Duquesne in 2016.
Her research interests include development of nanoparticles for delivery of nucleic acid therapeutics to treat CNS disorders. Her laboratory is investigating a variety of polymer-, lipid- and extracellular vesicle-based platforms for DNA and siRNA delivery to treat stroke, chronic neuropathic pain and gliablastoma.
Her research has been funded via internal and external funding sources. She was the recipient of a Duquesne University Faculty Development Fund (2018), New Investigator Award from the American Association for the Colleges of Pharmacy and Duquesne University Hunkele Disease Award (2017). She also received an IBM Junior Faculty Development Award at UNC-CH (2014).