Shriram Venkatesan, PhD
Postdoctoral Research Associate
From applied cancer research during my Ph.D., I intentionally took a deep dive into protein biophysics; and the journey has been fantastic. We can uniquely detect and query in high throughput – the limiting event, nucleation – in the path of normal proteins to form often pathological recalcitrant aggregates. As a team, we invented a method to detect nucleation events in living cells and also devised a way to quantitatively interpret such events. Following up on that, my work has unraveled an unforeseen link between rate of translation of a protein and its tendency to nucleate to form the aggregates. I am currently working on figuring out the mechanism for this link. Things that are outstanding at the Halfmann lab, according to me are the limitless possibilities to shape your project as creatively as you can; the intellectual drive, and the uninhibited pursuit of the necessary techniques to answer the question at hand in the best way possible.
Some aspects I could help you with are in coming up with your training plan, general experimental design, theory of protein phase behavior, translation, evolution and cancer.
Outside of science, I enjoy playing and following Cricket. I also love going on nature hikes, camping, and doing photography. Among other perspectives, I look for repetitive motifs in the world around us and capture them with my lens.