Nazneen is a research assistant. She obtained her Master's in Microbiology from St. Xavier's, Mumbai, and has worked in the fields of oncology and epigenetics before joining the team. She is interested in understanding the evolution of antibiotic resistance patterns in the clinical scenario. 

I am Vasundhara Karthikeyan, a BS-MS graduate from IISER, Tirupati, specializing in biology. My research interests encompass epigenetic regulation, bioinformatics, and microbiology, with a special interest in plant stress memory and the use of omics technologies to explore phenotypic plasticity. Currently, I am working at Ashoka University, where I am engaged in projects that employ comparative genomics to tackle antimicrobial resistance.

I am enthusiastic about anything that feeds into the life sciences, and will look at how mutator E.coli strains perform against wild types under different treatment regimes of three non-overlapping antibiotics.

Apart from science, I enjoy swimming, learning new languages and having a musical jam with anyone who cares to join me. I also aim to become an educator and a professional performer of Carnatic music.

I joined this lab as a 4th year ASP student, pursuing a one-year capstone thesis as part of the curriculum at Ashoka University. My dissertation project was on mapping virulence and carbapenem resistance genes in clinical Klebsiella pneumoniae genomes across India. On a larger scale, I am interested in genetics, genomics, molecular evolution and anything and everything scientific. Beyond reading research, I love to read recipes and try my hand at various dishes including those that I discover during travel and culinary explorations.