Hi everyone!
I’m Kriti Patra, a second-year BS-MS student at IISER Thiruvananthapuram, India, and I’ve been involved with the NASA OSDR community through my research on biological responses to the spaceflight environment.
My current work with Dr. Richard Barker investigates how deep-space stressors affect Arabidopsis seed germination. I’ve been working with NASA OSDR transcriptomic datasets, performing differential-expression and pathway-level analyses, building heatmaps and KEGG/SBGN pathway visualizations, and more recently integrating bulk stress responses with single-cell developmental data to investigate cell-type-specific susceptibility. We’re currently preparing a manuscript from this work.
Although my current research is in a plant system, the questions that interest me most are increasingly organism-independent: how different cell populations respond to perturbation, how regulatory programs change under stress, and how these responses can be reconstructed from single-cell and multi-omics data. I’m particularly interested in taking these computational approaches toward neuroscience and neurodegeneration, including understanding cell-type-specific vulnerability and biological responses to the spaceflight environment.
I’m therefore looking for a funded visiting undergraduate research opportunity for Summer 2027, particularly in computational/systems biology, single-cell or multi-omics analysis, AI/ML for biology, or computational neuroscience. Since I would be travelling internationally from India, support through a fellowship, scholarship, institutional programme, or host-lab funding would be essential for me to undertake the visit.
If useful for a potential Summer 2027 project, I would also be very happy to begin contributing remotely beforehand, so that I can learn the group’s methods and research questions and be better prepared to contribute when I join in person.
If anyone in the community knows of a lab, collaborator, funded programme, or other opportunity that might be a good fit, I would be very grateful for any suggestions or introductions. I’m happy to share my CV, GitHub, or more details about my current work.
Thank you!