Salman Banani became a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of Chicago in 2024.
Banani is a physician-scientist, biophysicist, and cell biologist. His lab broadly investigates the disruption of cellular structures and organization in the setting of various diseases with the goal of understanding normal cellular functions and to enable new therapeutic strategies. His group specifically focuses on biomolecular condensation, a fundamental process cells use to organize biochemical reactions into compartments through phase separation. Such compartments, known as condensates, are observed in cells across the kingdoms of life and are disrupted in numerous human diseases, ranging from cancers to rare genetic disorders. His research team leverages approaches from cell biology, genetics, biophysics, and clinical pathology to glean fundamental principles of how condensates function in cells by studying how they are disrupted in disease.
Banani graduated with a BS in Chemical Biology from the University of California Berkeley and received his MD and a PhD in Molecular Biophysics from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He completed residency training in Clinical Pathology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and his postdoctoral fellowship at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.