Welcome

Sreeja Sasidharan
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Physics, Lehigh University

Welcome to my academic homepage. I am an experimental biophysicist. I use microscopy, microfluidics, and lipid biochemistry to understand the intricate nature of cell membranes. Lipids are fascinating molecules that self-assemble to form the protective external membrane of living cells. During my Ph.D. at Raman Research Institute under the guidance of Prof. V.A. Raghunathan, I studied how lipids interact with different biomolecules using mainly X-ray scattering experiments. That is where I fell in love with lipid molecules. I was super curious about how nature designed this molecule. It forms a protective layer for the cellular interior. Just basic physics is enough to understand how lipid membranes heal minute pores within them. It is resistant enough for longitudinal stretching, acting as a solid, and at the same time, it is fluid enough to have random movement or “diffusion” at physiological temperature. There is a lot we know about them, but much remains to be explored. Then, why do we need to study them in such detail? Why not a simple understanding of their nature is enough? This question boiled down to a vast, fascinating question. “HOW DOES A CELL WORK?” A cell is the basic building block of all living organisms. It has a birth, life, and death cycle. Even a single cell can make many important decisions about its behavior and responses, just as we do when deciding how to respond to a situation. However tiny they are, they hide the secret of how life works. Fascinating, isn’t it?. That is why I decided to work on Biophysics.

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