Research journey has progressed from doing PhD at CSIR-IGIB wherein we elucidated the role of noncoding RNA during stress response. Thereafter Postdoctoral stints at Johns Hopkins University, USA; TRISUTRA (Translational Research and Ayurgenomics through innovative science), IGIB and Medical Research Council, Oxfordshire, UK helped expand the applications of Genomics towards different aspects of stress response. At Oxford, I was integral team member to develop the 3D white adipose tissue Organoid model for drug screening and regenerative medicine.

Current Research Group

Dr. Bharti Kumari

Project Manager

Her work involves monitoring and executing all ongoing lab projects deliverables, scientific administration and other miscellaneous duties.

Puja Roy

Project Associate-I

She is responsible for managing research activities, including project coordination, data compilation, documentation by maintaining project records to ensure efficient research management and facilitating smooth execution of laboratory operations.

Dr. Abhishek Goel

Senior Project Associate

His research primarily focuses on comprehensive analyses of niche-specific microbial dysbiosis associated with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) and its diverse phenotypes.

Dr. Aasif Majeed Bhat

Postdoc fellow

His research focuses on NGS and bioinformatics based genomic and shotgun metagenomic approaches at the host-pathogen interface to understand pathogen spillover to humans, essential to develop sentinel surveillance prior to a large outbreak.

Himani Singh

Senior Project Associate

Dr. Binata Marik

Project Scientist - I

Her work supports the identification of clinically relevant genomic variants and translation of genomic discoveries into biologically meaningful insights, strengthening the institute’s mission in genomics-driven healthcare innovation.

Jyoti Soni

Phd Student

Her PhD work involves understanding the dynamics of pathogen internalization by cell types and their role in regulation of disease severity.

Varsha R

Phd Student

Interested on understanding the mutational landscape of SARS-CoV2 and finds the structural and functional aspects for the disease severity and host pathogen response.

Pallawi Kumari

Phd Student

She is pursuing her PhD and is interested in NGS data analysis and developing the pipeline for the same.

Garima

PhD Student

She is pursuing her PhD and works with Transcriptionally Active Microbes (TAMs) in Dengue.

Nitin Jangir

PhD Student

He studies functional role of ncRNA in modulating differential disease severity.

Jyoti Khansali

PhD Student

She is pursuing her PhD and is interested in elucidating the role of alternative splicing in infectious diseases.

Aman Patel

PhD Student

His PhD research focuses on dynamic remodeling of the TCR repertoire and immune activation in response to TAMs.

Shaivyanand Singh

PhD Student

He is currently pursuing a PhD, with research interests centered on alternative splicing in the context of viral infections.

Muskaan Bano

Project Associate - I

She is interested in exploring the potential role of bacteriophages in AMR, the dynamics of Dengue Virus genome evolution, and conducting experiments to identify significant SNPs in cardiovascular diseases through Global Screening Array.

Shubham Kumar

Project Associate - II

His work focuses on single cell RNA analysis of COVID-19 and Dengue.

Samhita Pamidimarri Naga

Project Associate - II

She focuses on optimising bioinformatics algorithms and creating pipelines to facilitate (long) non-coding RNA research in Dengue, using bulk RNASeq.

Saloni Singh

Project Associate - II

Saloni is working on genomic surveillance of Dengue through whole-genome sequencing of patient samples and on a longitudinal Dengue cohort to understand viral evolution and host response. Her study also contributes to a single-cell RNA-seq project on T-cell activation, studying isoform changes and immune regulation.

Rakshita Ravi

Project Associate - I

Her work focuses on the application of Oxford Nanopore based sequencing and methylation profiling to explore host-pathogen interactions and genomics evolution in infectious diseases.

Akshat Jaiswal

Project Associate - I

His work involves understanding alternative splicing dynamics during dengue infection to uncover the role played by host transcript isoforms in disease progression and severity.

Vaishnav P. Varma

Project Associate - I

He studies host–pathogen epigenetic crosstalk via Nanopore methylation analysis while refining bioinformatics pipelines.

Mansi Pandey

Project Associate - I

Her work focuses on the role of alternative splicing in infectious disease severity.

Anil Kumar

Lab Assistant

Anil works as a Lab Co-ordinator for all administrative purposes.

Abhilash Kumar

Lab Technician/Project Assistant-II

He assists the lab-mates with housekeeping.

International Scholars

Jeanne Jorelle

The prime purpose of her thesis was to study the structure, function and the interaction of genes of microorganisms present in the gut microbiota of children, according to their diet and their age range.

Thierry Habyarimana

He was a TWAS-CSIR PostDoc fellow from Rwanda working on Single-Cell Genomics to explore the immune response

Trainees

Abhishek Kumar - 2026
Mansi Pandey - 2025
Ananya Gupta - 2025
Swasti Lehri - 2025
Saloni Koul - 2025
Abha Agarwal - 2024-25
Sristi Sinha - 2023-24
Aakarshan Raina - 2022-23
Akanksha Rana - 2022
Sparsh Sharma - 2022
Aarushi Garg - 2021
Saaransh Saxena - 2021
Sikha Bhatt - 2021
Anuradha Pandey - 2021
Sristi Sinha - 2021
Atish Gheware - 2021
Saksham Gupta - 2021

Former PhD Students

Dr. Partha Chattopadhyay, 2024

Partha completed his PhD on understanding the mechanism of LncRNA mediated gene regulation, unravelling chromatin level gene interaction at both bulk and single cell resolution. He is currently pursuing his post doc studies in Cambridge, London, UK from Ziad Mallat lab.

Dr. Priti Malik, 2025

Priti completed her PhD and worked on deciphering the role of co-infection in the outcome of pathogens.

Dr. Ranjeet Maurya, 2025

Ranjeet completed his PhD and his research interests included studies on the role of host response towards modulating pathogens’ pathogenicity through application of high throughput Next-Gen Sequencing technologies.

Dr. Priyanka Mehta, 2025

Her PhD research focused on how alternative splicing impacts RNA virus diseases like COVID-19 and Dengue, aiming to identify transcript isoforms that could improve disease prognosis and treatment strategies

Dr. Kriti Khare, 2025

Kriti attained her PhD and her research interests focussed on interpreting the role of cellular heterogeneity in disease severity and clinical outcomes.

Dr. Aanchal Yadav, 2025

Aanchal’s Ph.D. research (2025) uncovered how the “active” side of the microbiome — the transcriptionally active microbes (TAMs) — shape the course and severity of infectious diseases such as dengue and COVID-19.