Congratulations to Dr. Sujata Chaudhari, who has received the UNMC New Investigator award for 2024. This award is given to outstanding junior faculty members who have also received their first independent federal funding within the 2024 fiscal year.
Dr. Chaudhari received her PhD from Kansas State University in the Department of Biochemistry, where she studied chitin biosynthesis in flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum) and published several impactful manuscripts in PNAS and Plos Genetics. Following her doctoral studies, Dr. Chaudhari shifted her focus to learn metabolic processes using S. aureus as a tool in the Center for Staphylococcal Research at UNMC. During this time period and the first three years of her tenure as an assistant professor, she has published 16 manuscripts assessing staphylococcal metabolism and biology, two of which were first author publications.
In addition to her research, she has become heavily invested in outreach activities, particularly in training undergraduate students and teaching. For example, she has initiated collaborations with local colleges in Nebraska to recruit women into scientific research. Further, she directs the medical microbiology course in the College of Pharmacy and is launching a web-based course on vector biology at UNMC in spring 2025, which will be available to undergraduate and graduate students across Nebraska.
Dr. Chaudhari has started her independent career by merging her two disciplines (insect physiology and metabolism) to continue her studies assessing flour beetle chitin synthesis. Indeed, she received her first independent national funding, the NSF CAREER Award (R01 equivalent at the NSF), in March 2024. Dr. Chaudhari is one of a few individuals on campus with an NSF award (along with Dr. Scot Ouellette). She has also received the Mary G. and George W. White Funds (UNMC internal award).
Dr. Chaudhari and Drs. Amanda Brinkworth and Caroline Ng are the cornerstones of our departmental vision to create a vector biology program. To this end, Dr. Chaudhari has developed an independent research program assessing chitin synthesis in Ixodes scapularis, the tick that is the host of Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme disease. Thus, she has utilized her expertise in Tribolium, chitin synthesis, and metabolism to create a new research program to assess how chitin synthesis is regulated in ticks during the blood meal. To document her rise in this new field, she recently gave an invited oral presentation at the 2024 American Society of Rickettsiology on the tick cuticle. The university-wide research award ceremony will be held on Nov. 14 at 4 p.m.