Congratulations to Anita on her thesis defense!

On July 31, 2020 Anita Ramachandran successfully defended her thesis, “Mechanisms of Acquiring Memory for CRISPR-Cas Adaptive Immunity.”

With her interest in CRISPR arrays as archives of past infections, Anita has studied how spacers are added to the arrays. New spacers need to be inserted in the correct orientation to work properly in later CRISPR stages, and earlier this year her work on how asymmetrical trimming of prespacers by exonucleases plays a role in inserting them in to the array in the correct orientation was published in JBC and featured as an Editor’s Pick Highlight: A moonlighting nuclease puts CRISPR in its place.

Next, Anita will leave the Bailey Lab to work at Intellia Therapeutics.

Congrats and good luck Dr. Ramachandran!