He is the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Engineering and the director of the Center for Biomolecular Condensates (CBC) at Washington University in St. Louis.
He has made major contributions to understanding the driving forces associated with protein aggregation, and how the linear amino acid sequence of a disordered proteins determines its conformational behaviour, with a particular focus on the role of polar and charged amino acids.
[3][4][5][6][7][8] With postdoctoral fellow Rahul Das, Pappu discovered that the patterning of charged residues has a major impact on the conformational ensemble of a disordered protein.
[10][11][12] Pappu was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2013,[13] and in 2016 was elected as a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) for "outstanding contributions to protein engineering and design and the molecular basis of neurodegeneration through advances in computational biology".
[14] In 2019, Pappu was named a fellow of the Biophysical Society for "ingeniously implementing polymer physics approaches and molecular simulations to characterize intrinsically disordered proteins", and as a Mercator Fellow by the German Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).