Sankar MS, Post-doctoral fellow

 

I graduated from SASTRA university, India (2011-2015) with a B.Tech degree in Biotechnology. My exposure to fundamental questions in biology during my internships at IISER, Pune and NCBS, Bengaluru led me to pursue a Ph.D. with Tim Weil at the University of Cambridge (2016-2020), where I studied how messenger RNA (mRNA) translation is controlled during early development. More specifically, I investigated the biophysical properties of processing bodies, a class of cytoplasmic membrane-less organelles, in regulating the storage and translation of maternally deposited mRNAs using Drosophila as a model system. Following a brief postdoc with Simon Alberti at the TU Dresden (2021-2022), I joined Simon Bullock’s group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in 2022. Here, I continue to cultivate my interest in RNA regulation with a particular focus on co-translational mRNA trafficking in human cells using a multi-disciplinary approach.