Biography

My interest in studying biology arose from reading popular science textbooks about evolution and genetics by various authors during my freshman and sophomore years in undergraduate, even though I was majoring in Chemical Engineering. During the four years of my undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, I got the opportunity to work on various computational and modelling projects on quorum sensing and ubiquitination in pathogenic bacteria and the protein folding problem using the hydrophobic-polar model framework. I got an opportunity to do an internship at Dr Christian Landry’s laboratory at the end of my junior year, in the summer of 2019, where I got to work on my first experimental project, which involved studying the effects of mutations on protein-protein interactions using deep mutational scanning and CRISPR. This experience motivated me to pursue research in molecular evolution, and I decided to return to Landry lab for my master’s. Owing to the pandemic, I spent the second half of my senior year developing comprehensive epidemiological models to aid public health policy decisions. I finished my undergraduate degree in August 2020 and continued working on studying the socio-economic costs of the pandemic. Finally, in May 2021, I started my Master’s Degree in Biochemistry at Laval University in Landry lab.

Research interests

I am interested in studying how the binding interfaces of protein-protein interactions in paralogous and orthologous protein families have evolved across species. For my master’s project, I use various bioinformatics tools and analyses to identify key sequence features and binding motifs in protein sequences to understand how the binding specificity profiles of domain-peptide interactions are conserved or diverged in orthologs and paralogs.