PhD student
University College Dublin, National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT), Ireland
My name is Aswathy Balakrishnan, and I am a PhD researcher with EPSRC-SFI Centre for Doctoral Training in Transformative Pharmaceutical Technologies at National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT) and University College Dublin (UCD). I have a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Vellore Institute of Technology, India, following which I came to Ireland to do my master’s in Biopharmaceutical Engineering at UCD. My research aims towards the rational design of biopharmaceutical drug formulations. The initial section of my project deals with mechanistic modelling of solid-state hydrogen-deuterium exchange with mass spectrometric analysis (ssHDX-MS) for protein formulations. Now, I work on formulation and stability (both physical and chemical) of mRNA-lipid nanoparticles and the effects of lyophilisation on these mRNA-LNP formulations.