Biography

Dr. Muktha Natrajan began her research career through the University of Georgia Center for Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship in 2007 and has been growing to become an independent scientist since then. Through her commitment to her undergraduate laboratory, she was awarded national recognition by the Goldwater and Udall Scholarship Foundations, which led her to pursue a PhD program in Neuroscience and Immunology at the University of Cambridge and NIH, studying potential therapeutic targets for multiple sclerosis. She is currently pursuing her postdoc at the Hope Clinic of the Emory Vaccine Center, a clinical laboratory on the forefront of vaccine development and infectious disease research. As Emory’s coordinator of the NIH Vaccine Treatment Evaluation Unit's Systems Biology Core Facility and manager of the serology laboratory, her projects span multiple postdoctoral goals. She manages research specialists on large clinical studies for a multitude of microorganisms and has been able to focus her academic endeavors on data interpretation and assay development to improve our understanding of flaviviruses, such as Zika and Dengue. These viruses are transmitted by mosquitos so affect a large portion of the global population, partly due to the lack of effective vaccines against many of them. Dr. Natrajan intends to continue her career in infectious disease research and vaccine development, focusing on understanding the immune response to emerging global diseases.