Kaylani Sharma

Kalyani is an aspiring molecular microbiologist who is an MScR student for 2023-24 at the Laboratory for Bacterial Evolution and Pathogenesis (LBEP) at the Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh. She did her under graduation in Biological Sciences at the University of Warwick during 2020-23. The focus of her final year thesis under Prof. Gary Bending was on understanding the dual ecology of the fungal species Tetracladium.

During the summer of 2021, Kalyani received a ten-week research project grant under the Undergraduate Research Support Scheme (URSS) at the Department of Life Sciences, University of Warwick. This project under Prof. Murray Grant focused on the host-plant interaction with pathogenic bacteria and the study of disease resistance in Arabidopsis. Her work supported the research being done at the Grant Lab to investigate novel disease resistance mechanisms to develop sustainable agricultural production systems for food security. She presented a scientific poster on this research at the World Congress on Undergraduate Research (WorldCUR) and the British Conference of Undergraduate Research (BCUR) in April 2023.

In 2022, Kalyani took up a ten-week summer internship at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru, India, to strengthen her molecular lab work skills. At the lab of Dr. Aravinda Madhyastha, she worked on generating phylogenetic trees to identify the origin and phylogeny of the sample species. Her assistance in the identification of sample species contributed to plotting the biogeography and phylogeography of amphibian and non-marine mollusc samples to assess their responses to climate change.