Interview with Dr. Kruthika Iyer
Today we’ll meet Dr. Kruthika Iyer, a talented postdoc at UIC. Kruthika shared the endearing moment when she picked her career path.
“It was seventh grade. We heard about the virus [human immunodeficiency virus; HIV] and what it does. I thought ‘I want to work with that!’.”
She was intrigued with how HIV affects a certain population of immune cells whose role is to fight the virus. Since that day, Kruthika planned her career path.
In 2022, Kruthika received her PhD in Biotechnology with a focus in virology from the National Center for Cell Science in India. During her PhD work, she was working to understand how HIV interacts with its host’s cells and proteins to gain entry and replicate. Her lab worked with a class of proteins called heat shock proteins. While some of these proteins aid in viral progression, others are anti-viral. Check out her publication for a review of heat shock proteins in HIV. Kruthika warns that if you want to work with heat shock proteins, you have to be careful.
“Their expression changes even when the cells are under other types of stress [besides infection]. You try to keep all the variables controlled. If you don’t account for something, it could change your findings.”
Fast forward to 2022, Kruthika successfully defended her dissertation and moved to Chicago to work in the lab of Dr. Susan Ross in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. While she worked exclusively with cells in her PhD lab, now some of her experiments involve mice. Instead of studying HIV, her focus is now arenaviruses, which can cause severe hemorrhagic fever and mortality rates as high as 30% in humans. Lassa fever virus, for example, is a well-known arenavirus.
Due to the dangerous nature of these viruses, they require the highest level of biosafety measures. To avoid this, Kruthika’s current lab uses Candid #1 which is a vaccine against one of the arenaviruses, the Junín virus. Candid #1 contains a weakened version of the Junín virus. The vaccine strain causes infection in cultured cells and mice and requires less safety precautions than working with the arenaviruses themselves. Like her PhD work, Kruthika is still investigating host-virus interactions but is now specifically focusing on virus entry into host cells. She is currently testing the ability of a host protein inhibitor to restrict the virus, first in cell culture, then in mice. If you want to know the results of this promising study, you will have to wait for Kruthika’s manuscript to be published. She is planning on submitting it for review in early 2025. In the meantime, you can read her recent review.
Though her experiments sound demanding, Kruthika said the hardest part of the PhD student-postdoc transition was moving to a new country, experiencing a different culture, and working with new viruses.
“I realized there's a whole new world of viruses outside of HIV. For so many years, I was just working with HIV.”
Take Kruthika’s advice and try to avoid moving to Chicago in the winter. While she enjoys the cold and snow, the 4:30 pm sunsets hit different and not in a positive way. Thankfully, Kruthika found comfort in working with her colleague, a graduate student in the same lab.
“When you have someone to joke with and have fun with, it makes the work less intimidating. If you have to troubleshoot, you have someone to bounce ideas off of.”
In the future, she wants to use her near decade of experience to work in a startup company. Kruthika left us with some inspirational words:
“With all research, especially biology, you need to have a lot of patience. Failing is a big part of the job. Perseverance and patience are qualities that you need to develop in this field. During your training the idea is to gain skills, knowledge, experience so that you can go forward and do something impactful in life.”
What we learned from Kruthika:
Going outside of your expertise may be scary, but it can introduce you to a whole new world
A good working environment makes all the difference
Don’t underestimate your childhood dreams
Failure in academia is common, but it prepares you for greatness in the future