Members

Dr. Babu is the Professor and Head of Life Course Epidemiology at the Public Health Foundation of India. He has a medical degree (MBBS) from Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, and has completed an MPH and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has two decades of experience in public health research, practice, and academics. He began his career at the Center for Community Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi as a Junior Resident, and also worked with the World Health Organization (WHO), where he led the efforts to stop polio transmission in the state of Karnataka. He initiated advocacy for Measles surveillance in Karnataka, leading to the constitution of the Multi-Year Plan (MYP) for Measles elimination in India. He has been awarded the prestigious intermediate and now the senior fellowship of Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance to start and expand a cohort study in Bangalore. The cohort is named MAASTHI (Maternal Antecedents of Adiposity Studying the Transgenerational Role of Hyperglycemia and Insulin).

The Basu Lab is housed at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at South Dakota State University. We develop theoretical and computational fluid mechanics models of transport in complex biomedical systems, e.g., in respiratory physiology and in cancerous tumors. To validate the modeling framework, we collaborate with our peers specializing in experiments. The collaborations are often supplemented with our own simple in-house experiments performed in 3D-printed anatomic geometries.

Brett is an interdisciplinary global public health professor and scientist. His research focuses on planetary health and on better understanding the human health impacts of global environmental change. He has worked on projects at the intersection of health and the environment in East Africa, Costa Rica, and numerous locations throughout the United States. He teaches courses in epidemiology, applied biostatistics, global environmental health, and planetary health perspectives from Costa Rica.

Dr. Abhinav Bhusan received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Louisiana State University, and postdoctoral training from the University of California Davis and Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School/Shriners Boston. As an NIH K30 scholar at UC Davis, he obtained a second M.S. in Advanced Clinical Research. His lab's research is at the intersection of microfluidics (polymer and metal), cell and molecular biology, and medical devices. He participated in the NSF I-CORPS program to assess the market fit of a technology under development in my lab. He teaches courses in Biofluid mechanics, Medical devices, and Synthetic biology. He has received numerous awards, including an NIH K99/R00, an NSF CAREER Award, and the CMBE Young Innovator Award. He is passionate about student success and loves to develop out-of-the-box learning opportunities (First Sustainability Hackathon at Harvard) and participate in fun ways of communicating science.

Research in the Borchert laboratory explores the regulation of gene expression by noncoding RNAs and G4s. Our main focuses are on microRNAs (miRNAs), microRNA-like sequences excised from other RNAs (e.g., tRNAs and snoRNAs), sRNAs (similarly functioning short noncoding RNAs in prokaryotes), and long noncoding RNAs. Our lab examines the roles noncoding RNAs and G4 structures play during growth and development, infectious disease, how their misregulations contribute to various diseases and oncogenesis, and also how they evolve and contribute to speciation.