Photos

My research team - "X"-cellent lab crew. SURF 2023, NCNR, NIST

Surabhi Singh (left), a rising sophomore at the University of Maryland, College Park, works on a disease biophysics project where she seeks a connection between remodeled lipids (cardiolipin) in mitochondria resulting from malfunctioning biosynthetic pathway and structures of a membrane-bound protein (cytochrome c), which would lead to a failure of the ATP production of mitochondria and cause metabolic diseases.

Sanjana Sureshbabu (right), a rising junior at American University, works on a more engineering-oriented project, where she engineers native pre-scaffolds composed of multiple extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins on lipid membranes. These pre-scaffolds are designed to match cell requirements and expectedly boost cell efficiency in producing ECM scaffolds in vitro and facilitate cell growth in vivo for tissue repairs.

Both projects will employ cutting-edge X-ray and neutron scattering techniques to elucidate the structures and dynamics of the systems at nanoscopic length and time scales.