Gayathri Aruna Muthukumar

gmkumar[at]stanford.edu

As an undergraduate student in molecular biology at Columbia University, Gayathri studied proteostasis, organellar dysfunction and inflammation in multiple animal models of neurodegenerative disease. She then moved up north to Cambridge, MA to pursue her PhD in Jonathan Weissman’s lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in the MIT Department of Biology. In the Weissman lab, Gayathri used advanced functional genomics as well as cell biological and in vitro biochemistry approaches to define the landscape of biogenesis and quality control pathways used to insert signaling proteins into the outer mitochondrial membrane (OMM) of human cells. This work also led to the discovery of novel cytosolic targeting pathways for OMM proteins of different topologies, guided by the NAC and TTC1 chaperone machineries. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Bertozzi lab, Gayathri is currently focused on applying proximity-based labeling methods to spatially map organelle surfaces and interactomes, in addition to discovering regulation of organelle function and architecture by mapping relevant post-translational modifications with the help of “top-down” mass spectrometry methodologies.