Dinshaw J. Patel is an Indian-American structural biologist who holds the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Chair in Experimental Therapeutics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
He later recalled this experience, working in the laboratory of John D. Roberts, as his first exposure to NMR spectroscopy, a technique that would become a key part of his research program.
[1] In 1984 Patel moved from Bell Labs back to academia and became a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia University Medical Center, where his research group focused on using NMR to study double-stranded DNA structures.
He was recruited by Paul Marks at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to move his laboratory and work to develop the institution's new program in structural biology, alongside colleague James Rothman.
[1] More recently his group has focused on the structural biology of epigenetic regulation, examining the mechanisms through which chemical modifications of DNA and histone proteins exert regulatory effects.