Dr. Arun Upadhyay earned his PhD in bioscience and bioengineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Jodhpur, India. During his doctoral research, he worked on molecular pathways of proteostasis (protein regulation), such as autophagy (destruction within the cell for recycling) and the ubiquitin–proteasome system (protein tagging and breakdown), and identified novel functions of protein quality control E3 ubiquitin ligases (enzymes that attach destruction-related tags to proteins).
He was an assistant professor at the Central University of Rajasthan in India for a year. He then moved to Northwestern University in Chicago to join the research groups of Dr. Jeffrey Savas and Dr. Robert Vassar, where he is investigating the structure and proteomic composition of amyloid fibril cores deposited in Alzheimer's disease human and mouse brains. His innovative fibril-purification strategy and comprehensive proteomics pipeline have identified several novel amyloid-interacting proteins that have never been reported previously. He has also mastered metabolic labeling and pulse–chase proteomics and is continuing his research in neurodegenerative diseases and aging.