Raja is from Visakhapatnam, India. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from Institute of Bioinformatics, Bangalore, India. He spent four years during his Ph.D. in the laboratories of Prof. Akhilesh Pandey and Prof. Richard Huganir at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA. He gained an incredible experience in handling several generations of Orbitrap mass spectrometers, liquid chromatography and contributed to the draft map of human proteome He also used SILAC mouse model to study protein turnover in synaptosomes using high resolution mass spectrometry.

Raja joined the laboratory of Prof. Dario Alessi for his Postdoctoral studies in March 2017. He contributed to the identification of endogenous phospho RAB proteins as bonafide substrates of Parkinson’s disease linked kinase, Leucine rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2), and developed a sensitive multiplexed targeted mass spectrometry assay to monitor the LRRK2 kinase activity and phospho RAB proteins absolute amounts in PD mice models and VPS35 D620N patient derived neutrophils. In addition, he optimized phosphoproteomics workflows using TMT-based multiplexing strategies to identify the substrates of SGK3, LRRK1, NUAK1, NUAK2 and WNK kinases. Over the past three years, he has been part of Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative and employed ultra-sensitive data independent acquisitions mass spectrometry methods to study the Organelle proteomes such as Golgi, Lysosomes and mitochondria.

In 2023, Raja started as an Independent Investigator in MRC PPU, University of Dundee to study motor neuron disease in close collaboration with Prof. Siddharthan Chandran lab at UK-DRI Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh.