Dr. Dhakal assists with prior art research, patent application drafting and patent prosecution before the USPTO, and corresponds with foreign associates to guide the prosecution of foreign applications.

Dr. Dhakal earned a B.S. in Biology (Honors) from the University of Louisiana at Monroe in 2017 and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Yale University in 2023. He received the Gruber Science Fellowship, which is awarded to the top-ranked Yale doctoral candidates, to complete his Ph.D. studies. His doctoral thesis focused on discovering novel functional nucleic acids. He discovered several classes of riboswitches including one that detects and responds to oxidative DNA damage.

With ten years of research experience, Dr. Dhakal has worked in a variety of scientific fields, such as synthetic biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, RNA biology, nucleic acid engineering, and bacterial microbiology. In addition to co-authoring an article in Molecular and Biochemical Parasitology, Dr. Dhakal has two first-author scientific papers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has presented his research findings at a number of conferences, including the Southern Eastern Ecology and Evolution conference, the American Society for Microbiology, and the Microbes and RNA conference.

Additionally, Dr. Dhakal worked as a teaching fellow for a number of undergraduate courses, such as pathobiology and molecular biology. He also has interest in entrepreneurship and biotech ventures. He worked at Yale Ventures as a Blavatnik associate, helping entrepreneurs there to bring breakthrough technology they had developed in their labs to market. In addition, he participated actively in the Yale biotech and consulting club.