Dr. Subhra Mohapatra is a Professor of Molecular Medicine at the USF Morsani College of Medicine and a Research Career Scientist at the James A. Haley VA Hospital. Her laboratory focuses on the discovery and development of treatments for cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. For cancer research, her focus has been on understanding the role of the onco-immune environment that plays a critical role in tumor growth and cancer recurrence. She has developed a platform to expand cancer stem cells, identified several drug candidates for targeting cancer stem cells in breast, colon, and lung cancers, and studied their mechanisms of action. She is internationally recognized for her seminal contributions in the field of nanoscale tools and technologies that have advanced anti-cancer smart drug delivery, diagnosis, therapeutics, and theranostics. Her lab pioneered a proprietary nanofiber-inspired smart scaffold-based tumoroid culture technology to amplify cancer-initiating stem cells. The platform has led to a line of cell biology products including 3D nanofiber discs, micro-well plates, and customized 3D tumoroids for drug discovery research, which are being commercialized globally. This platform has led to a new paradigm of an evidence-based approach to 'personalize cancer treatment, which is being clinically tested. For neurodegenerative disease research, her focus has been to study chemokine signaling involving the spleen-brain axis in regulating neurodegeneration in traumatic brain injury and developing drug/gene delivery methods and anti-inflammatory agents. She made a pioneering discovery by identifying a chemokine as a key mediator of inflammation, which led to significant advances in our understanding of traumatic brain injury and the development of novel nanomedicine approaches to drug/gene delivery into the brain. In addition, inspired by the pandemic, she has pioneered a point-of-care testing device for COVID-19 and developed therapeutics targeted at preventing and/or treatment of long COVID.

Dr. Mohapatra’s research has been supported by the National Institute of Health, the Department of Veteran Affairs, and the Florida Department of Health. The high impact of Dr. Mohapatra's research is evident from her extramural award of $23 million in grants/contracts, over 100 peer-reviewed publications in high-impact international journals, and 27 patents (US and International) including two pioneer patents, seven of which have been licensed. She was elected as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) in 2021, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). She has served as the President of the USF chapter of the NAI (the largest chapter in NAI) (2021-22). She is an honorary fellow of the Florida Association for Nanotechnology (FAN) and has served as a Steering Committee member of FAN since 2012.