Aruna Dhathathreyan

Aruna Dhathathreyan is an Indian biophysicist, currently chief scientist and head of the Biophysics Lab, CLRI, Chennai.^[1] Her area of specialization is in spectroscopy of biomolecules and interfacial science.

Education

Aruna completed her BSc from Women's Christian College, Chennai and Msc from Madras Christian College. She earned her Ph.D. (Biophysics) in 1984 from University of Madras and worked at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Germany as a Postdoctoral Fellow (1983–84) and later as a scientist (1986–89). She is a scientist at CLRI, a national laboratory from 1991.

Research interest

Aruna's lab works towards a better understanding of structure, dynamics and function of biomolecules. Her work involves studying the effect of molecular crowding,interfacial viscosity on folding/misfolding, molecular assemblies of proteins and lipid-proteins on surfaces, unusual conformational changes in proteins.^[2]

Awards and positions held

She is the recipient of several prestigious awards like the Raman Research fellow (1999), Bronze medal in Physical Chemistry (2003), Streeshakti Science Samman award (2005),^[3] one of the 100 women scientist in India to be included in Lilavathi's daughters compendium brought out by Indian Academy of Sciences,^[4] Madras Science Foundation fellow (2012). She is also a member on board of programme advisory committee on Physical chemistry, SERB(DST).^[5]

References