Anjali Raju (CWRU ‘24) was recently awarded as part of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program in the “Life Sciences – Structural Biology” category, which “recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who are pursuing full-time research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in […] STEM fields”.
Anjali shared some details about her research:
I graduated from CWRU in 2024 with dual degrees in Biology and Biochemistry. I’ve been at the National Institutes of Health for the past two years, working in Dr. Jiansen Jiang’s laboratory of Membrane Protein Structural Biology at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. I’m planning to start at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in the fall, where I will be in the Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology Graduate Program to earn my PhD.
My research focuses on small membrane transporters, which are proteins that shuttle molecules across cell membranes and are critical to nearly every biological process, yet are notoriously difficult to study. My lab uses structural biology techniques, particularly cryo-EM, which involves flash-freezing proteins and imaging them with electrons to generate millions of 2D snapshots that can be computationally reconstructed into atomic-resolution 3D models. This lets us see not just what a protein looks like but how it works by observing which parts bind substrates, how it changes shape to move molecules across a membrane, and what triggers it to open or close. My project focuses on amino acid transporters activated by acidic conditions, comparing a bacterial and a mammalian example that share strikingly similar behavior despite being in completely different biological contexts. By determining and comparing their structures, I aim to uncover the conserved molecular features underlying pH-sensitive transport in transporters that share similar structures.
Biology alumna Soumyaa Das was also awarded an Honorable Mention in the “Life Sciences – Neurosciences” category. While at CWRU, she was also awarded the prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship. She is currently working on her PhD at MIT.
Congratulations Anjali and Soumyaa!
Anjali standing in front of a blooming tree.