Shalmalee Kharkar (ESR5)

Shalmalee is originally Indian but grew up in Dubai, U.A.E. Having nurtured a deep interest in Biology since school, Shalmalee acquired her Bachelor’s (Hons) degree in Biochemistry from Kingston University London, where she found the field of functional and disease genetics to be highly interesting. Therefore, she pursued her Masters in Genomic Medicine at Imperial College London. Her Master’s thesis was carried out in the lab of Professor Thomas Brand, where she worked on unraveling the dimerization ability of POPDC proteins, as well as understanding the functional impact of a potentially pathogenic mutation on POPDC1. After acquiring her Master’s degree, Shalmalee journeyed to Heidelberg (Germany) where she worked in the Lab of Dr. Kyung-Min Noh at EMBL Heidelberg. Over there she was tasked with engineering an ipsc-based cell line which intrinsically expresses Cas9. Following her interest in disease genetics and Bioinformatics, Shalmalee has now started her PhD at VUmc in Amsterdam under the supervision of Professor Sergey Nejentsev, and her project primarily deals with identifying unique biomarkers of Hyperactivated PI3KCD syndrome, also known as APDS, and other common and related immunodeficiencies. Shalmalee hopes that she will benefit from her PhD training to advance her career in personalized and precision medicine.