ANANYA HOTA

In addition to my coursework, I am also an active member of the Howard and Washington D.C. community.

 I am the Director of the Acquisition Editor team for the Ukweli Research Journal, Howard's premier undergraduate club for research.

I am also an Associate Director of Biology for the Pre-College Research Institute. This past semester, I led the planning and execution for several classes for the biology (STEM) component and also promoted various careers in STEM and research for underrepresented minorities. 

I am also a co-troop leader for Girl Scouts troop #3958, where I lead meetings and assist the members in gaining more experience in their careers of interest. 

Moreover, I am also a staff reporter for the Hilltop Newspaper, mainly working alongside the DMV and campus section. 

In the summer of 2022, I participated in an NSF sponsored REU at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

I worked in Dr. Briana Burton's lab in the Department of Bacteriology. There I investigated how certain recombination protein deficient cells are impaired at recombining divergent DNA sequences in Bacillus subtilis.

In the summer of 2023, I returned to Dr. Burton's lab to continue my project from the previous summer. This time, I used a computational approach to analyze how local patterns of sequence divergence affected outcomes of homologous recombination in wild type and 2 mutant backgrounds. 

As a culmination of my project, I presented a poster at the Molecular Genetics of Bacteria and Phage meeting. I was 1 of 8 recipients of the outstanding presentation award. 

I joined Dr. Karl Thompson's Lab in the fall of 2021, with an aim to gain research experience in microbiology and molecular biology. 

I am currently in progress of completing my honors thesis research project. The project focuses on characterizing the genetic mechanisms behind the Staphyloxanthin biosynthesis pigment pathway in S. aureus.

As an honors biology student, I was a part of the SEA-PHAGES program in collaboration with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). 

During the fall of 2021, I worked with a partner to isolate and purify bacteriophages that infected Mycobacterium Smegmatis mc 155 using microbiology and molecular biology techniques.

In the spring of 2022, I aim to use bioinformatic software to sequence the genome of our isolated bacteriophage Tictacs, which can also be found on phagesdb.org. 

Over the summer of 2020, I reached out to professors from a variety of STEM disciplines. I was fortunate enough to have received two research positions. 

Under Dr. Jie Li's mentorship, I identified and analyzed biosynthetic gene clusters of 10 strains of Streptomyces using Cytoscape and NCBI/anti-smash. 

With Dr. Paula Vasquez's guidance, I used MATLAB to study SEIR epidemiological curves with a number of variations in diffusion and Erlang distributions. 

These collective research opportunities cemented my interest in research and inspired me to pursue more research opportunities.

This upcoming summer, I am interested in pursuing a research internship in biomedical sciences to gain more hands-on experience as well as to explore the career of a physician scientist. 

I am currently working as a co-host called Science Hertz (available on Spotify).