Grace Gamba, BS
Professional Research Assistant
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics
Grace graduated in December of 2017 with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in chemistry with a biochemistry focus from Colorado School of Mines in Golden Colorado. During her final year at Mines she also worked as an undergraduate researcher with the Mathew Posewitz Research Group investigating possible sources of third generation bio-fuels. While with the Posewitz Lab, Grace cloned a novel strain of cyanobacteria containing two copies of an exogenous thioesterase and characterized the mutant strain by comparative growth and its production of medium chain fatty acids. She is looking forward to putting those experiences to work as a professional research assistant with the Ramachandran Lab.
Srinivas Ramachandran, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics
CV
Srinivas obtained a Bachelors in Technology in Industrial Biotechnology at Anna University, Chennai, India in 2006. He then went on to UNC Chapel Hill, where he conducted his graduate research from 2006 to 2011 in the lab of Prof. Nikolay Dokholyan in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics. He worked on the recognition of Platinum-DNA adducts by HMB1a and on modeling the calcium ion channel, Ryanodine receptor, among other projects. He became interested in nucleosome structure and dynamics towards the end of his PhD and headed to Steve Henikoff’s lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center for a postdoc from 2012 to 2017. In Steve’s lab, he worked on developing new computational and experimental methods to map nucleosome structure and dynamics in vivo during active processes like replication, transcription, and chromatin remodeling.
Past Research
PhD Publications
Satyanarayan Rao, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics
https://www.raosatya.me/
Satyanarayan received his PhD in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from University of Southern California, USA in 2018. In Rohs Lab at USC, he studied effect of CpG methylation on DNA shape features, and developed a method to profile those features in a high-throughput manner. The learned changes due to methylation led to explanation of epigenetic effects on protein—DNA binding. Before coming to USA, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Jayaram Lab, IIT Delhi, where he was involved in designing a scoring metric to capture native/native-like structures from a pool of protein decoys. He majored in Information Technology and made his way to biology. He is excited to be on board and use his accumulated experiences to understand genome regulation. He is passionate about Kalaripayattu, an Indian Martial Arts form. He also loves to do outdoor sports, photography and cooking.
Kameswaran Ravichandran, PhD
Lab Manager/Research Associate
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics
Ravichandran obtained his PhD in Biochemistry from University of Madras, India in 2009. His thesis work was on lung cancer chemoprevention. He joined the School of Pharmacy at the University of Colorado Denver as a visiting research associate to work on cancer chemoprevention. He then started his post-doctoral research in renal diseases and hypertension at the School of Medicine, University of Colorado Denver in the laboratory of Dr. Charles Edelstein. There he studied signaling pathways and therapeutic interventions in polycystic kidney disease and cisplatin induced acute kidney injury in lung cancer. He brings 10 years of experience working with rodent and cell culture models along with an array of molecular and biochemical assays. He has been in the CU system for almost 10 years and he enjoys working in team-based environments and has developed several collaborations to efficiently complete numerous projects. He has passion for hiking (vows to hike all the fourteeners), spelunking, traveling, soaking in the hot springs, and photography.
Alexis Zukowski, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics
In 2010, Alexis received her B.S. in Cell and Molecular Biology from San Diego State University, in San Diego, California. Afterwards, she spent a year in South Korea teaching English and then a year in biotech at ROKA BioSciences. Itching for more independent research, she started graduate work in the lab of Dr. Aaron M. Johnson at University of Colorado – School of Medicine in 2012. In the Johnson Lab, Alexis developed an interest for chromatin dynamics, specifically understanding how different pathways intersect with heterochromatin (the gene silent and condensed regions of the genome). Her thesis work focused on dissecting how and when a deubiquitinase is recruited by silencing complexes to form heterochromatin using budding yeast as a model system. She recently earned her PhD in the Molecular Biology Program in April 2018 and has moved into a post-doctoral position in the Ramachandran Lab. Here she aims to work on bridging biochemical and molecular insight of nucleosome dynamics to clinical applications in cancer.
