Koushika (PhD ’99) gains HHMI International Early Career Scientist award

Sandhya P. Koushika, a gradute of Brandeis’s Molecular and Cell Biology program (PhD, 1999), and currently running a lab at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, has been named an HHMI International Early Career Scientist. This pilot program of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute seeks to identify scientists working abroad with the potential to become scientific leaders, and awards each with $650,000 over five years to help establish independent research programs. Of 28 scientists from 12 countries so named, Koushika was the only recipient in India. While at Brandeis, Koushika worked in Kalpana White‘s lab on the role of ELAV in neural develeopment in Drosophila. In her postdoc, Koushika switched systems to work in the worm C. elegans, and her lab is currently focused on genetic techniques to study axonal transport, a key feature of nerve cells, in the worm model.