Samruddhi recently completed her PhD in Biochemistry and Structural Biology at Stony Brook University. Her fascination with protein 3D structures inspired her to pursue doctoral research in Prof. Peter Tonge’s lab where she focused on investigating the signal transduction mechanism of blue light-activated adenylate cyclase OaPAC (DOI: 10.1021/acschembio.4c00627). This work involved unnatural amino acid mutagenesis coupled with biochemical and biophysical assays to determine enzyme kinetics, as well as time-resolved infrared spectroscopy to study protein dynamics. Through this work, she developed expertise in protein engineering, construct design, enzyme kinetics, and time-resolved infrared spectroscopy.
Samruddhi grew up in India and earned the prestigious National Talent Search Exam Scholarship in 8th grade. She completed her B.Tech and M.Tech degrees in Biological Engineering at IIT Madras, India’s consistently #1 ranked engineering institute, gaining a strong interdisciplinary foundation in biochemistry, structural biology, computational biology and Python programming. Her master’s research explored the thermostability mechanism of a bacterial thermophilic enzyme, providing hands-on experience in protein biochemistry and X-ray crystallography.
Samruddhi is passionate about leveraging interdisciplinary approaches to study and engineer proteins. In Dr. Lakshmanane’s lab, her research now involves a structure-based approach to recombinant antigen and antibody design, along with the application of these proteins in high-throughput immunoassays for diagnosis and therapeutics.
