Karishma Chhugani

Karishma Chhugani is a graduate student pursuing her PhD in Pharmaceutical and Translational Sciences at University of Southern California’s School of Pharmacy. She completed her Master’s in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Southern California in May 2021. She graduated from University of California, Riverside in June 2019 with a Bachelor’s of Science in Cellular, Molecular, and Developmental Biology. During her undergraduate research career, she explored the mechanisms that relate to the biogenesis, stability, and modes of action of microRNAs in the plant: Arabidopsis Thaliana, focused on producing visual molecular dynamic simulations of Amyloid fibers related to Alzheimer’s disease using various software programs in Linux, and worked with Drosophila Melanogaster as an animal model to analyze neuronal systems of olfactory receptors. Karishma has interned with BioAtla, where she worked with antibodies and cell based therapeutics in cancer. She has also interned with Ferring Pharmaceuticals where she carried out experiments testing the equilibrium and kinetic solubility of various peptide compounds using Reverse Phase High Performance Liquid Chromatography (RP-HPLC). During her Masters at USC, she worked on benchmarking and analyzing the various RNA-seq and DNA-seq tools, along with writing commentaries on topics such as opportunities of computational research and the role of genomics in the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, as part of her PhD, Karishma is working on exploring the cell type composition, gene expression, and clinical severity scores in Sepsis patients through various machine learning and data driven approaches. Outside of school and research, Karishma loves fashion, learning new languages, playing piano, and dancing.