The International Biomedical Research Alliance’s Outstanding Recent Graduate Award was created to recognize the noteworthy and distinctive achievements of an individual who has graduated from the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program within the last two years. The honoree embodies the values of scientific innovation and collaboration leading to seminal biomedical discoveries at an early stage in their career. The 2022 Outstanding Recent Graduate Award was bestowed upon Dr. Jyothi Purushotham.
Jyothi Purushotham was an NIH-Oxford D.Phil. Scholar in the Class of 2017, with mentors Dr. Vincent Munster at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) working in the NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, and Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert at the University of Oxford. Jyothi began her D.Phil. working on the development of a vaccine against Lassa fever virus with Prof. Sarah Gilbert’s group in Oxford and Vincent Munster’s group at NIH. When the Covid-19 pandemic began, Jyothi quickly switched to assist with the development of animal models for SARS-CoV-2 vaccine efficacy testing and played a crucial role in providing data that allowed clinical trials of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine to be initiated. Jyothi’s thesis was a mixture of the Lassa and Covid vaccine development work, and one of the examiners at her viva said that she wished they could “award two DPhil degrees, one for each part of the work, as each was worthy of a degree.”
Dr. Purushotham is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Andersen Lab at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Her research focus remains within the discipline of infectious disease immunology; however, rather than developing vaccines she now studies immune responses to natural infection by viral pathogens. Specifically, her work aims to apply ‘systems biology’ tools to elucidate features of immune dysregulation underlying post-acute infection syndromes, such as after COVID-19 and Lassa fever.