Dr. Subhalaxmi Nambi, grew up in Mumbai, India. She studied Marine Biotechnology at the University of Goa where she worked on identifying and characterizing xylanases for the production of biofuels from unused plant materials. She then obtained her PhD in Biochemistry at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, India. Her graduate research focused on understanding the role of cAMP signaling in mycobacteria by characterizing cAMP receptor proteins. In the process she discovered protein acetylation in mycobacteria. Council for Scientific and Industrial Research of the Government of India supported her work at IISc. She arrived at Umass Medical School in the summer of 2013 and have since been a Postdoctoral researcher of the Sassetti lab within the Department of Microbiology and Physiology. Here she has been working on the role of genes of unknown function in mycobacterial pathogenesis and validating them as potential drug targets. Towards this end, she has identified new enzymes involved in redox homeostasis and cell signaling. This work is supported by the National Institute of Health.

Host-pathogen interaction; Biochemistry; Protein chemistry; Infectious diseases and Genetics.