PROMOTING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY BETWEEN INDIA AND THE U.S.
Cheshta Bhatia, student at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali- India, is a Khorana fellow this year, 2019 . She is currently a Khorana intern at Harvard University who did a previous summer internship with Dr. Lav Varshney at the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign. Read more to find out how Cheshta’s hard work during her Khorana Fellowship was acknowledged and awarded!
“I worked on the network analysis of Ciona intestinalis, which is the second organism after Caenorhabditis elegans to have a fully established connectome. We performed many statistical and topological analyses and our results point towards evolutionary convergence in the Caenorhabditis elegans, Ciona intestinalis and mammalian neocortex networks. It highlights the application of network science to biologically interpret complex brain networks. Our work aims to contribute to the comparative connectomics studies as well as in understanding mechanistic basis of behavior by generating predictions about future experiments involving genetic perturbations, laser ablations or monitoring neuronal activity propagation in response to stimulation. The publication of this work would be out soon!
This work has been presented in the “Science of science” conference at the University of Chicago center in Beijing on the 10th of June, 2019. It was presented by Dr. Lav Varshney, with whom I did this work and I am also authoring the paper with him. Here is the link for the conference: https://www.uchicago.cn/events/science-of-science/ . This conference involve presentations by scientists and technologists doing science along with a panel of science policy makers and publishers.
It has been presented by me in the Samuel group lab meeting on the 28th of June, 2019 in Harvard University and it was followed by multiple intriguing questions and interesting discussion.”