Alumni

Our Alumni

PhD Students

Dr. Rashmi Ira

PhD scholar (2020-2025)

Thesis Title: Development of Top-Down Enriched Microbial Consortia for Waste Treatment and Study of Microbial Community Dynamics during Anaerobic Digestion.

Current affiliation: Project engineer, Human Space Flight Center (HSFC) at Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Bangalore, India

Rashmi Ira is a microbiologist trained in Environmental Microbiology and Metagenomics. As an HTRA scholar in the Systems Biology Lab, her research focused on designing top-down enriched microbial consortia for the anaerobic digestion of organic wastes including cow dung, food waste, and wastewater for improved bioenergy recovery. Her work integrated culture-based microbiology with 16S rRNA metagenomic and Shotgun metagenomic sequencing, and bioinformatic analyses to understand microbial community dynamics and functional stability in complex microbial ecosystems. Rashmi also gained over five years of experience managing an in-house next-generation sequencing facility, operating Illumina MiSeq and NextSeq500 platforms, and conducting environmental DNA extraction from diverse sample types such as stool, food waste, fermented foods, plants, soil, wastewater, cow dung, and electro-flocculated and bioflocculated wastewater. Before starting her PhD, Rashmi worked as a Project Associate (JRF) investigating the role of individual bacterial strains in enhancing anaerobic digestion of wastewater, and contributed to studies on natural rubber biodegradation and microbial consortia design.

Dr. Arjun OK

PhD scholar (2019-2024)

Thesis Title: A Genomic Approach Towards Unraveling Probiotc Enigmas; From Genomic Signatures to Identification and Evaluation of Potential Probiotic Organisms.

Current affiliation: Scientist-I at HaystackAnalytics Pvt. Ltd., India

Arjun has been interested in utilizing comparative genomics to identify taxa-specific signature sequences for Probiotic genomes. Before joining the lab, he was working on understanding how genetic divergence can contribute to reproductive isolation resulting in the speciation and adaptation of Drosophila species. After completing his PhD, he joined as a Bioinformatics Specialist at SETOLABO Inc., Japan for about a year and is currently working as Scientist in Technology (Bioinformatics) Department at HaystackAnalytics Pvt. Ltd., India.

Dr. Aditi Jangid

PhD scholar (2016-2022)

Thesis Title: Role of gut microbiota composition and functions: Impact of host genes, dietary factors & bacterial taxa on intestinal immunity.

Current affiliation: Motivational speaker

Aditi was a CSIR Fellow in the TPS Lab. She previously worked as a Project assistant at IISER Bhopal. Her research interest includes ultilization of different OMICs techniques such as metagenomics, transcriptomics and metatranscriptomics to decipher the role of microbiome and their subsequent functions in mammalian gut and cross-talk between two. Different applications includes study of disease models, probiotic and prebiotics models etc. Later, she worked as a Postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Harvard MEdical School and Massachusetts General Hospital; and Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Dr. Fauzul Mobeen

PhD scholar (2014-2021)

Thesis Title: Comparative Human Gut Microbiome Analysis of Healthy Individuals Stratified based on the Traditional Medicinal Systems

Current affiliation: Senior Programmer - Biostatistics and Statistical Programming at SIRO Clinpharm Pvt. Ltd., Maharashtra, India

Fauzul defended his thesis in June 2021. Later, he joined as Senior Research Fellow at Aligarh Muslim University. He also worked as a guest faculty at Mahatma Gandhi Central University; Technical Associate at National Institute of Biomedical Genomics and Data Scientist at iNDX.Ai. He is currently working as Senior Programmer at SIRO Clinpharm Pvt. Ltd. His research interests include Biostatistics and Statistical Programming, microbiome analysis, multi-OMICS and Systems Biology. His programming skills includes R, Python, Bash, and Matlab.

Dr. Vikas Sharma

PhD scholar (2013-2019)

Thesis Title: Comparative Analyses of Selected Microbes with Open Pan-genomes Highlight Their Evolutionary Dynamics at Functional Level

He holds a PhD in Microbial Comparative Genomics with research experience in Bioinformatics, Computational Genomics, Microbiology, and Next-generation Sequencing, and Data Analysis. He later moved to PGIMER, Chandigarh for his Postdoctoral research.

Other Students (Btech, Mtech, Dissertation, Interns), Project Staff and NGS Scientists

Ms. Inchara (M.Tech Biotech, 2023-25)
Mr. Devansh Pundhir (M.Tech Biotech, 2023-25)
Mr. Lalit Narayan Mudgal (Integrated B.Tech-M.Tech in Biotech, 2024)
Mr. Adil (2019-2024) (Integrated B.Tech-M.Tech in Biotech, 2024)
Mr. Kshitij (Integrated B.Tech-M.Tech in Biotech, 2024)
Mr. Shivam (B.Tech student)
Mr. Shubham (B.Tech student)
Dr. Sonali Soni (July-Dec 2024) worked as Senior Project Scientist for NGS facility.
Dr. Gurunathan Subramanian (2022- 2024) worked as Senior Project Scientist for NGS and is currently working as Associate Professor in Department of Life Sciences, Kristu Jayanti University, Karnataka, India.
Ms. Prithvi S Prabhu (M.tech Biotech Aug 2023 - Aug 2024) Thesis Title: Prithvi has joined as a Project staff at IIT Mandras.
Ms. Ananya Gautam (M.tech Biotech Aug 2023 - Aug 2024) Thesis Title:
Mr. Rahul (Intern May - July 2023): Rahul was a summer intern in the lab and his project work involved the in silico analysis of Metagenomic dataset to study the probiotic roles of gut microbial species.
Mr. Sachin: (Project Staff 2023): Sachin joined the lab as Field Assistant for the SERB-supported COVID-19 surveillance project.
Ms. Saumya Shukla (M.tech Biotech Aug 2022-Aug 2023): Thesis project - Systems Biology application in environment pollutant degradation and conversion to valuables. Saumya is currently pursuing her PhD research at IIT Kanpur.
Mr. Jitesh Adwani (M.tech Biotech Aug 2022-Aug 2023). Thesis Title: Jitesh is currently working as Scientist-I at Strand Life Sciences, Bangalore.
Ms Snehlata Rao (M.tech Biotechnology Aug 2021 - Aug 2022, Thesis Title: Study of Natural Polymer and Products of Synthetic Polymer Degrading Ability of Bacteria through In silico and In vivo Approach). Currently, Snehalata is working as a Ph.D. scholar at IIT Kanpur.
Dr. Priti Pandita (Apr 2021 - Mar 2022) Dr. Priti worked as a Field Applicant Scientist (for NGS) in the lab. She is presently working as a Molecular Biologist at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH-NIH).
Mr Prashant Pandey (Research Scholar Feb 2022 - June 2022). His interest lies in RNAseq analysis. Currently, he is working as Senior Scientist at Biocon limited.
Ms Mira Koul (M.Tech. Biotechnology Aug 2020 - June 2021, IIT Mandi, Thesis Title: Investigating Host-pathogen interactions in Atopic Dermatitis). Mira's work involved integrating metagenomics and transcriptomics approaches. Her interest also lies in epigenomics, disease biology and learning different Next Generation Sequencing technologies. Currently, she is pursuing PhD at IIT Roorkee in Medical Informatics.
Ms Jeevita Konari (M.Tech. Biotechnology, Aug 2020 - June 2021, Thesis Title: Integration of comparative genomics and transcriptomics to study genus Acetivibrio for hydrogen production with the conversion of biomass.) She has been interested in constructing the genome scale metabolic models, Next generation sequencing techniques, and environmental biotechnology. Currently, she is pursuing PhD at IIT Chennai in Systems Biology.
Dr. Shrawan Kumar (Aug 2017 - Sept 2020) worked as a Field Application Scientist for NGS Facility in the lab. Presently, he is working at QIAGEN.
Ms Mayuri Mathur May 2019 - Nov 2019 worked as an intern. She studied M. Tech. Biotechnology from Center for Converging Technologies, University of Rajasthan, Internship Project Title: Biodegradation of Latex Rich Lab Waste Using Gram-negative Bacterial Strains.
Ms Priya Singh (M.Tech. Biotechnology, Aug 2018 - June 2019, Thesis Title: A comparative metagenomic study of human gut microbiome of different aspects of inflammatory bowel disease). Currently, she is working as a research student at CCMB, Hyderabad.
Ms. Rupinder Kaur (Project Student, Biomarkers for Oral Cancer, May 2018 - Dec 2019)
Ms. Shatabisha Bhattacharjee (Project Student Waste water treatment, 2017 - 2019)
Mr. Somdutt (M.Tech. Biotechnology, Aug 2017 - June 2018). Somdutt is pursuing his PhD at IIT Delhi.
Ms Arisha Arora (B.Tech in Biotechnology, 2014-2018, Heritage Institute of Technology', Kolkata, Summer Internship, Thesis Title: Comparative Genome Analysis of Klebsiella sp. KAY2026 and Klebsiella pneumoniae subsp. rhinoscleromatis ATCC 13884, May - June 2017). Currently, she is pursuing M.Tech in Biotechnology from MANIIT, Allahabad (M.Tech in Biotechnology, 2019-2021).
Mr. Gaurav Chetal (M.S. by Research Feb 2013 - 2016) Thesis Title: Quality control approaches for Metagenomic data analysis.

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