Akash Gupta, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Houston, where he is a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research and Presidential Frontier Faculty Fellow. His research focuses on engineering delivery vehicles and RNA therapeutics for next-generation vaccines and cancer immunotherapies. Prior to joining the University of Houston, he completed his postdoctoral training at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, where he developed RNA-based vaccines and immunotherapies. He received his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where his research focused on engineering nanomaterials to combat multidrug-resistant bacterial infections. He has published more than 35 scientific papers and is an inventor on more than five granted and pending patents.