San Francisco Archives

Ms. Oishi Choudhury is a PhD candidate at the Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi. She qualified for the University Grants Commission (UGC) NET-JRF (Junior Research Fellow) in 2022 and began her doctoral journey in 2023. She completed her master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Delhi, specializing in biological anthropology with a focus on epidemiology and public health.

Oishi has published a book chapter and a manuscript revolving around biological anthropology and public health. Her research interest extends to molecular anthropology. Her doctoral research aims at screening, awareness, and counselling of beta thalassemia trait among young adults in Delhi-NCR India.

As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow at University of California San Francisco, Oishi is conducting a comparative study on thalassemia carrier screening and genetic counselling protocols in India and the US. Oishi is enhancing her expertise in advanced screening techniques for diagnosing thalassemia trait in the U.S. As part of her research, she will work at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, home to one of the largest thalassemia programs in the U.S.

Dr. Ranjith Padinhateeri is a professor in the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT Bombay). Dr. Padinhateeri’s lab focuses on theoretical studies to understand various biological phenomena using a variety of tools from physics, including statistical mechanics, polymer physics, and soft-matter theory. His specific areas of interest include nucleosome dynamics, chromatin assembly, DNA mechanics, and the self-assembly of proteins.

Dr. Padinhateeri completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Institute Curie, Paris. He gained expertise in applying physics principles to understand biological systems. Dr. Padinhateeri joined the IIT Bombay faculty in 2009. He and his team developed computational models to investigate the kinetics of nucleosomes and the polymer organization of chromatin. Dr. Padinhateeri has received several awards, including the National Bioscience Award from the Department of Biotechnology India.

Dr. Padinhateeri’s Fulbright-Nehru project aims to develop a model to understand chromatin organization —the organization of the genetic material— in space and time inside a cell nucleus, accounting for nucleosome dynamics. The predictions from computational studies of the model could help us to design gene regions that can have specific chromatin states. As a part of the fellowship, Dr. Padinhateeri also plans to teach a course on modeling biological processes covering stochastic processes, Monte Carlo simulations, and molecular dynamics simulations.