IU Bloomington graduate student, Ph.D. Informatics

Amrita Mohan is among the first students in the new Ph.D. program in the School of Informatics, which began in fall 2005. The 22-year-old graduate student was attracted to the IU Bloomington campus and its informatics program for several reasons. Most notably, she was impressed by the research of several professors and wanted to work with them.

Mohan earned her Master of Science in Bioinformatics from IUPUI where she worked as a research assistant with informatics professor Keith Dunker. Her research involved studies based on intrinsic protein disorder and molecular recognition.

Before arriving at IU, she received a bachelor’s degree in information technology from the University of Delhi, India, in June 2003. Along with her undergraduate studies, Mohan undertook a year-long project at the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi, to design and develop a relational database management system for metabolic and signaling pathways. In June 2002, she was accepted as an intern and trainee to the E-Cell lab (a software suite for modeling, simulation, and analysis of large scale complex systems such as biological cells) in Japan, and she was the youngest person to participate in a biochemical simulation training program there. Besides learning about the E-Cell software system, a major goal of her internship was to perform dynamic simulations of the metabolic pathways in E. coli. She also did experimental projects based on FISH (fluorescence in-situ-hybridization) techniques.

During her first year, Mohan wants to join a salsa club. “I am crazy about Latin American dances,” Mohan says. “But other than that, I love to work with dogs and any kind of work involving them would be great too.”

She is looking forward to work as a postdoctorate and hopes to be in charge of her own lab a few years from now or work as a scientist in a leading research and development corporation.