Anu Swaminathan
Ph.D. Student
Biomedical Sciences
University of Connecticut Health Center

As a CARTHA Fellow, Anu is attending the 2008 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston and volunteering to generate a meeting report of the CARTHA panel titled “Humanity at the Nexus: Academic Partnerships and Entrepreneurship in Global Health.” Her aspiration is to assist with designing programs for a leadership training academy on behalf of CARTHA Fellows like herself and procure grant support for these activities.

Anu was born in the southern Indian city of Chennai, India where she completed her schooling and received her Bachelors degree in Biochemistry from the University of Madras. She came to the United States in 2002 to pursue research in biomedical sciences. Since then she has worked in three different labs at two universities undertaking multiple research projects in fields as diverse as immunology, structural biology and microbiology.

Some of the research projects that she has been a part of include the following:

1. Studies on the immunology of nutraceuticals with the focus of using them as food supplements in the army (University of South Carolina, Columbia.)

2. Research involving the use of Australian funnel web spider toxins as insecticides (University of Connecticut Health Center).

3. Research on environmental sensor proteins in bacteria with the focus of using them as antibacterial targets (University of Connecticut Health Center).

Currently, her PhD thesis topic is centered on studying pilus assembly in the diphtheria causing bacterium Corynebacterium diphtheriae with the end goal of developing novel, broad-spectrum antibiotics against Gram-positive bacteria such as the, ‘superbug’, Staphylococcus aureus. She will be graduating in 2009 with a PhD in Biomedical Science from the University of Connecticut Health Center (Area of concentration- Molecular, microbial and structural biology). She has presented posters of her research at meetings of the American Society of Microbiology in Columbia, South Carolina (Winner of poster award, 2003) and in Vancouver, Canada (2005); the Boston Bacterial meeting (2005) at Harvard University; and at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (2007). She has published part of her thesis work at the UConn Health Center in the journal Molecular Microbiology (2007) under the title ‘Housekeeping sortase facilitates the cell wall anchoring of pilus polymers in Corynebacterium diphtheriae.

Anu has been a member of the Bharath Scouts and Guides Movement throughout her high school and college years in Chennai and has participated in several community outreach activities as a member of this organization. These activities usually involved volunteering at old age homes, orphanages and schools for the handicapped in the city of Chennai. She has participated in several inter-school and inter-collegiate debates, oratorical and essay writing contests in both English and her native language of Tamil. In particular, she has been a winner of the state level oratorical contest Talk your way to Malaysia 1996 organized jointly by the Rotary Clubs of Madras and Malaysia and also winner of the national level elocution contest Talk your way to Japan 1998 co-organized by the Junior Chambers of India and Japan. As the winner of these contests she had the opportunity to tour Malaysia and Japan, interacting with Rotary Club and Junior Chamber members of these countries and sharing her experiences at speaking engagements conducted by these organizations. She was also runner-up in the Talk your way to London 1997 elocution competition at the Annual Chennai Book Fair.

In her spare time, Anu loves reading books, mostly biographies and fiction. She watches foreign language movies especially those from Brazil and Mexico and also movies in Tamil. She has a yellow belt in tae kwon do and her favorite pastime is playing scrabble and literati online. She loves speaking, writing, and interacting with people from different walks of life. She considers communication and people skills as her greatest strengths. She is a member of the American Society of Microbiology, the Junior Chamber of India, and a student member of the Licensing Executives Society and the Association of University Technology Managers.

Anu currently lives in Farmington, Connecticut with her husband, Vedakumar Tatavarty, a Ph.D. student in Neuroscience at the University of Connecticut Health Center.