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Devika Kurup (ESR7)

Devika is an Indian research student interested in the neural mechanism underlying developmental disorders and associated behaviors. During her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry, she got the opportunity to work on a project that studied the genotoxic and anti-proliferative effects of herbal plant metabolites. This work received a research award in 2018 and was subsequently published. The following year she earned her graduate degree in Biochemistry. Her thesis work on artificial induction of plant immunology got published in 2019, with Devika as the first author. During these years, she also volunteered at FaBLab (part of a laboratory network of MIT), where she assisted in workshops on engineering projects. After graduating, she worked as an application specialist (of GC-MS/MS) for ThermoFisher before re-entering the field of research. She is also a co-author of an application note by ThermoFisher on the quantification of pesticides found in wheat.

In 2019, she started her neuroscience graduate program at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). To pursue her growing interest in behaviour and brain functions, she joined the Whitlock group at Kavli institute of system neuroscience for her thesis. The project, supervised by Dr. Jonathan Whitlock, investigated the neural basis of social learning in rats using intracranial reward stimulation and optogenetics.

Recently, she joined the Badura lab of Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, as a Ph.D. candidate. Under the supervision of Dr. Aleksandra Badura, she will investigate the effect of PI3Kδ mutations on behaviour and neural functions, with a particular interest in understanding its link to the immune system.

My supervisors

 Aleksandra Badura

My co-supervisors

Virgil Dalm