Jessica Bodosa

About

I am a PhD candidate in Biophysics at the University of Maryland in Dr. Jeffery Klauda’s lab. I am co-advised by Dr. Richard Pastor at NHLBI/NIH as a GPP (Graduate Partnership Program) predoctoral fellow. I obtained my Bachelor’s-Master’s degree in Biology from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. My Master’s thesis under the supervision of Dr. Anand Srivastava, Molecular Biophysics Unit1, IISc was on using molecular dynamics to obtain the free energy cost associated with partitioning amino acids across a phase-separated membrane. My Bachelor’s thesis was on bioinformatic analyses of MHC Class II proteins with Dr. Nagasuma Chandra, Department of Biochemistry, IISc.

I am native of Guwahati, Assam and can speak Assamese, Hindi and English.

Research

I primarily use Molecular Dynamics (MD) to simulate membrane proteins with ligands.

  • In this work we showed that there is an energetically favourable membrane-mediated pathway that bulky lipophilic antibacterial drugs can take to bind to the EmrE efflux trasnporter in E. coli.
  • We show in this book chapter why we need asymmetric membranes in simulations and how to build them.

Awards and Fellowships

  • March 2024 : Biophysics Award for Research Excellence pre-candidacy, Biophysics Program, UMD, College Park
  • Dec 2023 : Anton 2 RFP Award, Pittsburg Supercomputing Center
  • May 2023 : Graduate Women’s Fellowship, D. E. Shaw Research
  • Sep 2020 : Dean’s Fellowship, UMD, College Park
  • 2015-2020 : KVPY science research fellowship, Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India

Updates

  • April 2025 : Served as a judge for the “Artificial Intelligence and Data Modeling” category at GRAD conference, UMD 2025.
  • April 2025 : Served as a Category Judge in “Biology” at the Montgomery County Science Fair, 2025 link.
  • April 2025 : Presented a talk titled ” Simulating Membrane Pore Formation by Piscidin Peptide” at the Physics of Living Systems (PoLS) - SRN, UMD, College Park link.
  • Feb 2025 : My poster titled “Improving the force field for lipid interactions with calcium and beryllium” was presented at BPS 2025, Los Angeles link.
  • Feb 2024 : Flashtalk and Poster Presentation: “Lipid-mediated entry of antibiotics in EmrE” at BPS Annual Meeting, 2024 link.
  • May 2023 : Flashtalk titled “Metadynamics study of ligand-bound EmrE” at the Graduate Women’s Fellowship, D. E. Shaw Research, 2023.
  • June 2023 : Presented a Poster at the “Mechanisms of Membrane Transport” Gordon Research Conference, Geneva, Switzerland, 2023.
  • Feb 2023 : Poster titled “Benzyltrimethylammonium binding study to EmrE” at BPS Annual Meeting, 2023.

Footnotes

  1. Fun fact! The seminar hall in MBU, IISc used to be the office of G. N. Ramachandran of Ramachandran (\(\phi\),\(\psi\)) plot fame.↩︎