Theinmozhi Arulraj, an Integrated M.Sc student at University of Hyderabad has been offered a doctorate position at the COSMIC (Combating Disorders of Adaptive Immunity with Systems Medicine) network. COSMIC program aims at integrating experimental and computational approaches to understand the role of germinal centers in disease conditions such as B cell lymphoma and Rheumatoid arthritis. During her Ph.D. she will be working at the Systems Immunology group headed by Dr. Michael Meyer-Hermann at Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Braunschweig, Germany. Her research will mainly focus on mathematical modeling of initialization of germinal centers.
Theinmozhi pursued her Integrated Masters in Systems Biology during 2013-2018 with her Master’s thesis focusing on mathematical modeling of PD-1 pathway under the supervision of Dr. Debashis Barik. She was an Indian Academy of Sciences summer research fellow in 2016 and she developed a statistical model to understand body composition and body weight changes of infants under the guidance of Dr. K. V. Venkatesh at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. She was also a recipient of University of Alberta Research Experience (UARE) fellowship – 2017. As a part of UARE fellowship, she worked in Dr. Barakat’s lab at University of Alberta where she investigated the effect of CTLA-4 antibody on the co-stimulatory and co-inhibitory interactions on the T cell surface through modeling studies.