Pipettes & Popsicles

Science, Closely Read

Hi, I'm Anushka, a researcher and writer. I believe that science matters most when it is communicated well and reaches beyond the lab—to policymakers, journalists, and concerned citizens who need to understand it too. One experiment at a time.

My research and writing span genomics with the American Museum of Natural History, Tuberculosis drug-resistance at the DOH, and a proof-of-concept machine-learning model I built to detect infections from cross-border travel. Here are some of my favorite posts:

Want to be the first to know about a newly discovered fish in the Congo? Read Living in the Footsteps of Elephants
Want to know why I'm obsessed with global health research, international collaboration and policy ? Check out From Patient to Researcher
Want to use science to bridge health inequities? Read Paul Farmer was Right: Global Health Inequities

Lastly, read my published independent research on detecting cross-border infections using Random Forest Models here!

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TB on the Frontlines

Institution: Wadsworth Center, New York State DOH

Research: Multidrug-resistant TB kills over 1M people a year, hitting hardest where treatment access is lowest. I characterized genes 2508, 61-69, and 61-71 in the ESX-1 cluster to identify their role in contact-dependent conjugation: a step toward non-antibiotic targets for TB.

Beyond the Lab

My final cells with the edited gene, stored for future use. CRISPR and Recombineering. (Left to Right) Don't trust anyone, or at least, bacterial colonies. I'll tell you why. The classic way to knock out a gene is to replace it with an antibiotic resistance cassette, in my case one conferring Zeocin resistance, and then look for survivors. The reason we replace it with an antibiotic resistant marker rather than a random series of amino acids is to check for proper insertion.

Meet Smegmatis, TB's Least Threatening Sibling

Creating liquid overnight cultures of mc²155 and Jucho cells for later use. Cells are kind of like humans. If they recognize each other as family, they’re not going to exchange DNA. If they aren’t family, they will exchange DNA. That’s probably not something you want to think about, but it’s exactly how Mycobacteria, on a baseline level, choose to interact with one another. Let me back up. If you’ve been reading my blog posts, you know that I worked for six weeks in the Gra

Paul Farmer was Right: Global Health Inequities

Salmonella typhi—the same disease millions of people in India contract every year—was exotic enough in New York to significantly lengthen my time in the hospital and slow my care down. In previous blog posts, I’ve detailed how my questions following this experience led me to pursue an independent research project and reach out to the Wadsworth Department of Health lab, where I recently finished interning at. It also made me curious about the history of global health and the b

From Patient to Researcher

I know what it’s like to be lying in a hospital bed with a terrible bacterial infection contracted in India, waiting anxiously for a medical professional to figure out why this escalated so badly. Waiting to be diagnosed, waiting to be given medication, waiting to be fixed. Now I know what it’s like to be on the other side of that wait. What it’s like to work in a lab dedicated to public health research aimed at fast traveling global diseases, especially those increasingly re

Published Research! ML for Travel-Associated Disease Risk

I’ve finally submitted my paper to the National High School Journal of Science. This has been such an interesting process. I came in with just a question and no idea how to even begin to answer it and now I have a fleshed out research paper full of new information I’ve learned. To be clear, it definitely wasn’t all smooth sailing. I had to completely restart with a new dataset, reframe my paper to address the limitations of using synthetic data, and constantly work to improve

Keanu Has Some Explaining to Do

I recently watched The Matrix and I’m kind of obsessed with the last scene where Keanu Reeves steps out and puts on his oval, rimless black sunglasses and the camera zooms out onto the cityscape of the Matrix. I definitely understood Keanu's confusion in the Matrix (I mean it kind of destroyed his entire reality) and think he could have benefited with one of these above, which is what I'll be discussing today. A Confusion Matrix! It’s been a while since I’ve written about my

Thankfully, My Badge Still Works

So, there you have it. Those are the three patterns that we concluded from a year’s worth of research, and I feel pretty happy about how much we got done. I came into this project pretty skeptical about working with fish, and pretty confident that the only thing I would leave excited about was if we found a new species. And, yes, that was exciting to me and everyone who visited our poster. However, to be completely honest, I found it more interesting that we were able to conn

Identical Surroundings, Different Genetics

Epiplatys duboisi (pictured above) lives right alongside Congopanchax brichardi and Epiplatys chevalieri— same stretch of river, same environmental pressures. If habitat alone drove genetic diversity, you'd expect all three species to exhibit very similar complicated, structured patterns. But, if you look at the networks, E. duboisi's is comparatively simple and uniform — its populations are much genetically similar to each other (less nucleotidic differences) than the other

No Rain, No New Friends

Now that we’ve discussed the rainforest dwelling species, it’s only fair that we move on to the river dwelling species so they don’t feel left out of the conversation. Congopanchax brichardi, Epiplatys chevalieri, and Epiplatys Duboisi are found in the marginal vegetation of small streams and rivers in areas exposed to the sun, which is very different than the canopy-covered rainforest we discussed the other three species living in. We found that the haplotype networks of the

Living in the Footsteps of Elephants

The first pattern that we identified after analyzing these haplotype networks was a pattern shared by all rainforest dwelling species that we sequenced. You might think that the six species of fish living in the Congo River basin would inhabit pretty similar environments; however, that actually isn’t the case at all. Take New York City. When people from elsewhere in the world think about living here, they imagine tall skyscrapers and bustling streets near Times Square. Sure,

Something Fishy About These Networks

A couple weeks ago, I presented this poster at our final science research colloquium. It went well. I cracked a few hilarious jokes here and there, people laughed, our poster looked super cool and had a really nice color scheme…anyway, the issue wasn’t getting people to come by. It was mastering explaining the complex networks—that I’m taking many blog posts to write about—in 2-3 minutes. It was especially nervewracking when the president of the entire American Museum of Natu

Jeremiah has Cousins and I Can Prove it

I know what you’re thinking. Why does this look like a crazy seating chart for a big family reunion where some people have to be a certain distance from other people in order to avoid violent fights while others may want to share a table and reminisce over childhood memories? Or you saw the large fish scattered between the networks and assumed that this had to do with fish, given that a lot of my prior blog posts have been about my research barcoding Congolese fish at the Ame