Raja Veerapandian is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Division of Biology, Kansas State University. He received his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Microbiology from Bharathidasan University, India. He did his Ph.D. degree in Microbiology in the same University under the title “In vivo-expressed proteins of virulent Leptospira in conclusive diagnosis and DNA vaccination”. During his graduate program, he received prestigious fellowships like International travel grant for the young scientist (2013) and CSIR- Senior Research fellowship (2014-16) from the Government of India. Later he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Riverside (2017) for a brief time. He then moved to the Dr. Vediyappan’ s laboratory at Kansas State University in 2018. His current research is “Developing therapeutics to treat oral biofilm infections”. As an appreciation of his research, Raja received KINBRE postdoctoral fellowship (2019-20) from K-INBRE, NIGMS, NIH. The overall goal of Raja’s career is to not only make significant scientific discoveries, it is also oriented to teach, inspire, and mentor the next generation of young minds.
