Geetha Saarunya is a doctoral student in the Integrative Biology program at University of South Carolina. Her research focus is on identification of unique microbial genomic signatures and examining the effect of external perturbations in microbial community structure. Her love and passion for teaching and research in Biological data analyses lead her to co-design a problem and project based bioinformatics course with her advisor at U of SC. She is also the Stanford University’s Woman in Data Science (WiDS) ambassador for the state of South Carolina.
Her introduction to the field of Computational biology was marked by encouraging and motivating mentors . Similarily, she hopes to inspire and mentor her fellow female students as a WiDS ambassdor.
Geetha has an undergraduate engineering degree in Biotechnology from SRM University in India and a Masters in Biological Sciences from University of South Carolina.