Hello, welcome to my tiny corner of the web! 

I am a postdoctoral fellow at the
Collins Lab at MIT


I am interested in understanding the metabolic capabilities of disease-causing pathogens using computational and experimental biology.

Please visit my Publications and Projects to learn more about the work I do.

Experience

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Systems biology approach to identify novel antimicrobials and elucidate their mechanism of action funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)

Supervisor: Prof. James J. Collins

University of Geneva

Metabolic networks governing Toxoplasma gondii persistence and transmission
Interdisciplinary PhD (IPhD) project funded by the Swiss Initiative for Systems Biology (SystemsX.ch)

• A stage-specific genome-scale metabolic model for the apicomplexan parasite, T. gondii was generated. The in silico model was refined, harmonised with available experimental data and simulated to make predictions on potential target genes required for parasite survival.
• Several drug targets were validated with high-throughput experimental approaches, such as genetic modifications with CRISPR-Cas9, metabolomics and transcriptomics.

Supervisor: Prof. Dominique Soldati-Favre, University of Geneva
Co-supervisor(s): Prof. Vassily Hatzimanikatis, EPFL and Prof. Adrian Hehl, Institute of Parasitology (IPZ), University of Zürich

EPF Lausanne

Collaborative work involving the generation of a stage-specific metabolic network for T. gondii using MATLAB and genome-scale modeling toolboxes. The curation, analysis and interrogation of the model for experimental validation was performed with Dr. Anush Chiappino-Pepe at the Laboratory of Computational Systems Biotechnology (LCSB), led by Prof. Vassily Hatzimanikatis.

ETH Zürich

Elucidating the role of protein phosphorylation in regulating Escherichia coli metabolism

Performed follow-up experiments to validate the results obtained during my master thesis with 13C-based metabolic flux analysis, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), targeted mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and phospho-proteomic approaches. The work was done at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology (IMSB) led by Prof. Uwe Sauer.

Roche Molecular Diagnostics Rotkreuz

Assisted in the development of custom-built applications for the generation of internal study protocols and case report forms through meta-data analysis (Macro Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic). The work was done with the data management team led by Dr. Kamran Rastgooy.

SRM IST Chennai

Molecular dynamics study of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Mex-B protein inhibition
Performed molecular docking and dynamic simulations to study small molecule inhibition of multidrug efflux pumps. Packages from Schrödinger Maestro 9.0, GROMACS 4.5 and PyMol for molecular visualisations were used.  The work was supervised by Prof. Waheeta Hopper.

Education

Fellowships and Awards

Memberships

Volunteering

The project was conceived as part of the national VersusVirus hackathon which ran in early April 2020, and focused on issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.