Profile

I am Manasa (she/her). I am an Indian, persued PhD in the USA and currently living with my husband in Edinburgh, Scotland. I am an avid home gardener and so we are sorrounded by plants (especially during the summer) at our home. I love growing vegatable-bearing plants, both heirloom and exotic. My husband and I are both involved in research and in our free time enjoy bird-watching and nature-watching; tiny little Robins, a variety of Finches, Dunnocks, Sterlings, Blue tits, Great tits, Rooks, Pigeons and several other small and large birds are regular visitors of the area where we live and some of these pay visit time to time to our resident bird-feeder. We also greatly enjoy cooking world food and gorging them down. We love reading books and I am currently reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. As a kid I always wished to learn a classical Indian dance which I am currently fulfilling. My dream is to one day move back to India and teach chemistry while doing research.

We all take medication when we fall ill. Where do they come from? How do they work and how do we know that they are safe? The answers to these and many more questions come from an amalgamation of the fields of Biology, Chemistry, Pharmacy. I am a fellow researcher in one such area that combines the knowledge from the above three disciplines into one field of Chemical Biology. A Chemical Biologist is someone who uses chemistry to understand, visualize or manipulate the cellular biology. When we make new drugs for body ailments, we are essentially manipulating the cellular biology. But not every drug we design will do what is expected of it, and may have unwanted effects or no effects at all. After all, our body is a soup of chemicals and any chemical/drug given from outside may react with it in many ways. Knowing how the external chemical/drug behaves inside a cell or body is absolutely necessary for it be approved for use.

But, majority of the time, new toxicity information of drugs is not available until the final stages of development (decades of work) due to complex reasons and this leads to shelving of projects. To avoid this pitfall, my project involves making tiny chemical tags which shine under a specific microscopic technique. These tags when attached to drugs and injected into cells, will allow us to follow them together under microscope and visualize what the drug does to the cell, where it goes and how it changes the biology. This information improves our understanding of its behaviour; benefits and side-effects. Knowing this and much more, which may not sometimes be revealed until the final stages, will enable well informed drug developement process from the beginning of the project.

This project is being run at the beautiful campus of Kings Buildings, School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh