Kiran Kumar Shivaiah

Kiran Kumar Shivaiah is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory and a Specialist in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at Michigan State University. He works in the Benning lab, focusing on plant lipid metabolism and enzyme structure-function relationships.

Research interests include lipid droplet dynamics in plastids, protein interactions governing acyl-CoA carboxylase assembly, and physiological responses to nitrogen availability in maize hybrids. His work spans structural biology, enzymology, and plant physiology.

Recent publications highlight studies on plastoglobule lipid droplets, including their isolation techniques, interaction mechanisms (e.g., fibrillin amphipathic helices), and omics analyses of stress-tolerant plants. Earlier work examined evolutionary conservation of lipid droplet biology and thermophilic enzyme biochemistry.

He can be reached at shivaiah@msu.edu.