PhD Students
Subrata
Subrata Duary completed BSc from Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira in 2018 and received MSc from IIT Hyderabad in 2020. He joined Prof. Thalappil Pradeep research group in the Department of Chemistry at IIT Madras in September 2020 for his PhD (link to his page in PRG website). He was selected as a Prime Minister’s Research Fellow (PMRF) in 2022. His research explores the structure and properties of atomically precise noble metal nanoclusters and their bioconjugates. He uses single-particle cryo-EM to understand the protein-nanocluster interaction at the molecular level.
Sunanda
Sunanda Gautam is a Ph.D. student under Prof. N Manoj in the department of Biotechnology, IITM. Her research focuses on the structural analysis of the DnaB helicase of prokaryotic bacteria. DnaB helicase plays a pivotal role in bacterial DNA replication by unwinding the parental double-stranded DNA into single strands, thereby enabling genome duplication. To investigate this process, she employs single-particle cryo-EM to determine the high-resolution 3D structure of DnaB helicase as well as its complex with single-stranded DNA and an ATP analogue. These structural insights will provide molecular level understanding and the conformational transitions associated with the crucial process, the loading of DnaB onto DNA.
Harshita
Harshita Nagar is an MSc Chemistry gold medallist and qualified the CSIR-UGC NET-JRF and GATE examinations in Chemistry in 2022. In the same year, she joined the research group of Prof. T. Pradeep for PhD. Her doctoral research focuses on atomically precise metal nanoclusters and their 3D structure determination using cryo-electron microscopy, particularly through the microcrystal electron diffraction (microED) technique.