Affordable Medical Devices & Sensors

Overview
Research Focus
Select Publications
Facilities
Projects
Research Staff
Overview

At the Affordable Medical Devices and Sensors Laboratory, broad interdisciplinary research efforts on biosensors and biomedical devices is being carried out by blending the biological world of living systems with an electronic interface that amalgamates scientists and engineers who are passionate and committed to offer optimal solutions to the social eco-system. The focus of the research is on the development of novel nano and micro technology based sensing approaches for medical diagnostics in collaboration with academic, clinical and industrial partners from both India and abroad. In addition, the team also uses nano-bio-electronic approaches for building, modeling and interfacing device prototypes. On the other hand, the laboratory also works on rapidly developing areas such as biomimetic systems, assay development, biological chemistry and biomaterials for various applications in biomedical and therapeutic areas.

Research Focus

Development of Novel Biosensors for the Early Detection of Aβ Biomarker in Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease

The global, progressive and irreversible deterioration of many cognitive functions associated with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) are hampering the daily life of patients. Current diagnostic procedures of AD are difficult and are made in an advanced stage of the disease. Therefore, it is clinically important to find accurate markers for AD by new non-invasive methods that may facilitate the diagnostic process, identify patients at an earlier stage and monitor biochemical effects of the treatments. The continuing demand to develop fast, simple and inexpensive analytical methods for the determination of many clinical and biochemical parameters has motivated us to work on the development of novel and innovative solutions for the detection of AD biomarker, Aβ peptides, using a combination of preanalytical approaches and sensitive label free immunosensor to facilitate and enable early AD diagnosis.

(Courtesy: Sci. Rep., 6:25155, 2016)

• Self Assembled Monolayers
• Schematic representation of the electrochemical
• detection by Aβab-MNG modified AuSP

Development of an Electrochemical Biosensor System for the Rapid Detection of Microorganisms:

For decades, food-borne and water-borne pathogens have posed a great risk to human health and are still the cause for public worry. Nowadays, over 250 diseases known already are resulted from diverse food and water-borne pathogenic microorganisms, such as pathogenic viruses, parasites, viruses, bacteria and so on. Among them, the one with the highest occurrence frequency is bacteria, which takes up 91% of the appearance causing various diseases. The development of quick, sensitive and targeted approaches to detect pathogenic bacteria is very critical to guarantee good health and social living. The advent of nucleic acid-based pathogen detection methods offers increased sensitivity and specificity over traditional microbiological techniques, driving the development of portable, integrated biosensors. The miniaturization and automation of integrated detection systems presents a significant advantage for rapid, portable field-based testing. These technologies allow improved detection sensitivity, and also provide important early warning data to decision-makers to protect public health.

Development of High Strength 3D-Chitosan Based Products for Biomedical Implants:

Polysaccharides, such as chitin and its derivative chitosan, hyaluronan and alginates have been used as biomaterials, especially as biomedical implants. These existing bioabsorbable implants have several disadvantages such as low mechanical properties, high cost, undergoes acidic degradation and undesired biological responses. A preferred bioabsorbable implant should provide enough  mechanical strength, induce or promote new bone formation by osteogenic cells and possess  some bioactivity by being osteoinductive. Therefore, there is the need to improve the degradation profile of the degradable polymers currently used for osteosynthesis in order to match more closely the bone healing process. In order to address the above problems and develop better biomaterials with optimized degradation rates, higher strength or stiffness and improved biocompatibility, we are working towards the development of novel 3D dense chitosan-based products, their production process and assess their attractiveness for future chitosan-based absorbable implants.

Novel Interactive Tools for Children with Juvenile Arthritis:

Arthritis is a painful autoimmune disease that attacks the joints. It is most common in the fingers, wrist and knees. Arthritis has no cure but it can be taken into remission through daily exercise. However, due to joint pain, children often do not exercise therefore, their arthritis never gets better. Hence, to overcome this problem, we intend to design and develop interactive exercise tools and toys for children with Juvenile Arthritis. The product to be developed helps children heal by teaching them how to exercise correctly using exercise tools that are user friendly and soft. It consists of different tools – each targeting a different joint group of the hand: wrist, knuckles and mid-finger joints. The proposed product is unique because nothing in the market fulfills the needs of children with arthritis. In fact, there is very little created for them in the current market, most exercise tools are made for adult hands, not for children’s hands. Even regular toys cannot be used by children with arthritis as they are too small for their swollen fingers. This product will be able to act as a fun toy and an exercise tool as children play while getting healthier.

Representations of different points in the hands of children with juvenile arthritis

(Courtesy: ePainAssist.com)

Wearable EMG Strips

Electromyography is a diagnostic tool primarily used for assessing the electrical activity of the muscles. The proposed EMG device would be a wearable system, conformable onto any surface of the human body. Primary application is continuous monitoring of the muscles’ activity, which is prevalent in the sports industry.  The product also finds applications as a functional Monitoring system for prosthetic arm, EMG-driven robotic arm for after stroke rehabilitation, and can be used in nerve conduction studies. EMG also has niche applications, as a discriminating tool to identify true labor pains from the other false alarms.

EMG System

The system has two parts:

• Disposable sensor surface which can be easily plugged to
• Reusable electronics along with IOT based EMG wave generator application.

Sensing Surface: Screen printed electrodes, SENIAM standards
Electronics: Electronics is designed on a flexible PCB, capable of signal acquisition and transmission. Signals can be received and displayed on a mobile screen wirelessly using Wi-Fi. The entire system sits conformal on the skin surface inside a housing, which can be pasted on the skin using medical grade adhesives.

Nanosensor for Rapid Detection of Staphylococcus aureus human pathogen
Staphylococcus aureus is a major human pathogen which causes a wide range of infections in human beings. Detection and identification of this pathogen is crucial for proper management of patients. Although a variety of testing methods are available for the detection of this pathogen, they are time consuming and their performances vary from setting to setting and need improvement. Rapid detection of this pathogen is the need of the hour. To cater to this need, the team has developed a low cost, nanomaterial based sensors for rapid detection of S. aureus pathogen.

The developed sensor has shown good sensitivity towards various concentrations of the said pathogen under laboratory conditions. The sensor shows high selectivity towards S. aureus against other human pathogens.

Maximum likelihood approach based Structural Phasing in Protein Crystallography

Phaser is a likelihood-based method for determining the substructure of anomalously scattering atoms in macromolecular crystals that allows successful structure determination by single/multiple-wavelength anomalous diffraction (SAD/MAD). The phasing algorithms in Phaser have been developed using the well-known maximum likelihood approach, of multivariate statistics. One of the design concepts of Phaser is that it should be capable of a high degree of automation and these phasing algorithms give better phases. The crystallography phasing method requires the calculation of the likelihood function and its first and second derivatives. As a part of the refinement procedure, the likelihood function needs to be calculated millions of times in phasing problem. Thus, speed is a very important factor in the calculation of likelihood and its derivatives. A recursive method has been developed which effectively reduces a multi-dimensional integral to product of three simple line integrals. This has been coded in C++. Then by reconstructing the electron density map one can understand the structure of the proteins. Solution to the phase problem enables in the manufacture of more effective pain killer drugs. This work was undertaken with Cambridge Institute of Medical Research, University of Cambridge, UK, funded by NIH

Modeling X-ray data is iteratively carried on in two steps. The first being model building and the second is the refinement process. Local improvement of the basic model is termed as model building and its global improvement comprises of refinement, both based on experimental data. Even a small protein crystal might contain a billion molecules. If the internal order of the crystal is poor, then the X-rays will not be diffracted to high angles or high resolution and the data will not yield a detailed structure. If the crystal is well ordered, then diffraction will be measurable at high angles or high resolution and a detailed structure should result. The X-rays are diffracted by the electrons in the structure and consequently the result of an X-ray experiment is a 3-dimensional map showing the distribution of electrons in the structure. A crystal behaves like a three-dimensional diffraction grating, which gives rise to both constructive and destructive interference effects in the diffraction pattern, such that it appears on the detector as a series of discrete spots which are known as reflections.

Steps in protein crystallography study

Removing phase ambiguity

Each reflection contains information on all atoms in the structure and conversely each atom contributes to the intensity of each reflection. As with all forms of electro-magnetic radiation, X-rays have wave properties, in other words they have both amplitude and a phase. In order to recombine a diffraction pattern, both of these parameters are required for each reflection. Unfortunately, only the amplitudes can be recorded experimentally and all phase information is lost.

In a diffraction experiment, the intensities of scattered waves from the planes (denoted by ) in the crystal are measured. The amplitude of the wave is proportional to the square root of the intensity measured on the detector. To calculate the electron density at a position in the unit cell of a crystal requires a summation to be performed over all the  planes. In other words, the electron density at () = the sum of contributions to the point () of waves scattered from plane () whose amplitude depends on the number of electrons in the plane, added with the correct relative phase relationship. Mathematically, this can be expressed by the relationship

where is the volume of the unit cell and  is the phase associated with the structure-factor amplitude . The amplitudes can be measured, but the phase information is lost in the experiment. This is the phase problem.

In crystallographical study measurement errors are minor source. But due to the phase problem, most of the errors originate in differences between pairs of structure factors (measured and observed). By virtue of the central limit theorem the differences of the structure factors tend to be Gaussian, provided the phases are known. But in practice, the phase information is lost and the observations happen to be just amplitudes or intensities. As such after integration over the unknown phases, the distribution fails to be Gaussian, which gives rise to a complicated multi-dimensional integral, with various other parameters.

Maximum likelihood method is a modern approach, which applies various statistical tools and the inclusion of more data and information. The main feature of maximum likelihood is that it incorporates errors of the data, so that highly accurate models can be built, than the data would otherwise permit. For this reason the likelihood approach plays an important role in protein crystallography. The idea behind applying maximum likelihood estimators in the process of refinement, experimental phasing and with Phaser is that the molecular replacement has substantially increased rates of success in finding the structure, over the methods that they replaced. In maximum likelihood, the consistency of the model with the data is assessed by the likelihood function, which is defined as the probability of making the set of measurements given the model. The likelihood function which is the joint probability distribution of structure factors,  is given by

and after eliminating the unknown phases by integrating over all the phases, the complicated integrand reduces to

In general, for a fixed set of data and underlying statistical model, the method of maximum likelihood selects the set of values of the model parameters that maximizes the likelihood function. Intuitively, this maximizes the “agreement” of the selected model with the observed data. Since the amplitudes lack some information (their phases) and are not ideal, this difference can be nearly arbitrarily reduced by adding more and more atoms that were not really present in the crystal structure or allowing positions that chemically do not make much sense. The likelihood function is the probability distribution of the observations, which are intensities or structure-factor amplitudes in crystallography.

Select Publications

1. Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes enhance the Response and Sensitivity of the Ammonium Biosensor based on Alanine dehydrogenase. Ushmaben Chandrakantbhai Dave, Deepak Ingale, KrishnaVenkatesh, Venkata Krishna Bayineni, Ravi-Kumar Kadeppagari. Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. (2017)784:102-108. IF:3.012. 

2. Molecular insights into interactions of human islet amyloid polypeptide with lipid membranes using Atomic Force Microscopy and Fluorescence Microscopy. Divakar M.B., Ravi Kumar C.R., Narendra Reddy, Santosh M.S.  Asian J. Chem.(2016) 28(12): 2788-2792. IF: 0.8

3. Insulin Modulated Self-Assembled Nanostructures of IAPP Under Amyloid Disease State Divakar M.B., Ravi Kumar C.R., Narendra Reddy, Santosh M.S. Adv. Sci. Lett.Manuscript Accepted. IF: 1.253

4. Design of a Three Lead ECG Amplifier System. Uma Ullas Pradhan and Naveen Kumar S.K. International  Journal of Advanced Research in Computer science and Software Engineering. (2015)5(12):77-80. IF:2.080

Facilities

Epi-Fluorescence Microscope, Milli-Q Model DQ3 System, Freeze Dryer Gamma 2-16 LSC Plus

Projects

• Exploring the Dynamics of Pancreatic Peptide-Membrane Interactions through Nano-scale Imaging: Implications on Type II Diabetes Mellitus – SERB-DST.
• Design and Development of an Electrochemical Immunosensor for the Detection of Amyloid Beta in Biological Fluids of Alzheimer’s Patients collected on Dried Matrix Spots – BIRAC-CEFIPRA.
• Development of an Electrochemical Biosensor System for the Rapid Detection of Biowarfare Agents – DRDO.
• Development of High Strength 3D-Chitosan Based Products for Biomedical Implants – DIC
• Development of a Novel Hemostatic Material as a Rapid First Aid Solution – BIRAC-SRISTI
• Development of Affordable IoT Based Soil Health Monitoring System for the Increased Crop Production – SSPS
• Low cost foetal heart rate and uterine contraction monitoring device-SSPS
• Driver assist system for traffic sign board detection- SSPS
• Design and development of affordable Lab in a Pocket for Engineering students-SSPS

Research Staff

Santosh holds a Ph.D in Chemistry from National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal. During his Ph.D, he was awarded the Swedish Institute Guest Scholarship to carry out a part of his research work at Stockholm University, Sweden. He was one among the 250 people selected globally to be a part of the Nobel Prize 2009 Lectures & Award Ceremony held at Stockholm which is rarest of the rare life time opportunities. He is the only Indian till-date to be awarded the IUPAC’s Junior Researcher Award for Research Excellence in Thermodynamics (2010). He pursued his Postdoctoral Research work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. He has many international publications to his credit in journals of high repute. He has delivered several invited talks on various scientific topics & skill development programs. He has also trained many teachers & students in numerous training programs. Identifying his contributions to Science Education, he was recognized as one of the Global Shapers of Karnataka by the World Economic Forum in 2012. He was awarded the Fast Track Young Scientist project grant in 2013 by the Department of Science & Technology, Govt. of India. In 2014, he was awarded the prestigious Commonwealth Professional Fellowship – UK, Short Term Fellowship – Hungary & Summer Research Fellowship – India. Recently, he won the BIRAC-GYTI “SRISTI Award of Appreciation” in 2017 for his innovation on Rapid First Aid Solution. He was one of the 20 Young Scientists selected by the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India and participated in the BRICS Young Scientists Conclave – 2017 held at Hangzhou, China. He acts as a Focal Point to the European Union Funding Programs & facilitates Indian students/researchers on collaborative activities. He has successfully nurtured & facilitated several Indian students applying for various fellowships/scholarship at Foreign Universities. He also has the experience of serving as the Chief Operating Officer of an Incubation Centre supported by DST-ALSTOM. His research interests are in the areas of energy storage materials, protein folding, biomedical devices & biosensors, water & has research collaborations spanning different countries & continents. He also has the experience of executing projects being funded by various agencies such as DST, DRDO, BIRAC-CEFIPRA, DIC, and is currently working as an Associate Professor.

Email Id: santosh.ms@ciirc.jyothyit.ac.in

Uma Ullas is an active researcher in the field of Nano sensors and materials, with special interest in biomedical devices and IoT based sensors for water quality monitoring and graduated with a doctorate from the University of Mysore. In addition to being an Associate Professor at the centre, She also happens to be a courtesy Associate Professor at Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA. She has also taught courses at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels Electronic Science and Nanoscience students at the prestigious MCC, Bangalore, India for nearly twenty years. Currently, she is working on fabrication of Nano sensors and wearable medical devices like electromyogram, which finds applications in diagnosis of neuromuscular disorders and sports; and Nano material conducting ink for printable electronics. Uma is actively engaged with industry as consultant for Nano sensors, and is onboard with GEMN Research & Development, a startup in biomedical devices space. She is also a co-investigator of a UGC sponsored Indo-US collaborative project on soil condition testing and monitoring. Uma has the distinction of publishing numerous papers in several international and national journals, and has been a member of Board of Studies and Board of Examiners of various institutions. She has also authored a book on Electronics for students pursuing Bachelor’s degree at Bangalore University, Bangalore, India.

Email Id: uma.ullas@ciirc.jyothyit.ac.in

Deepak Ingale has a Master’s in VLSI and Embedded Systems. He has over seven years of academic experience and two years of industrial experience with Wipro Technologies. He has worked as an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Emerging Technologies at Jain University and had been involved in setting up a DSP Laboratory, where he actively taught M.Tech students. He has also designed and delivered value added programs on LABVIEW programming, PCB Designing and building embedded systems for hobby using ARDUINO. He had been a Project Engineer at Wipro Technologies and was instrumental in component selection, board re-design (PCB), setting up & conducting First Piece Evaluation (FPE) of various telecom switches and related activities. He has been involved in designing the electronics part of the nano-biosensor for ammonia detection and used in micro air vehicles, funded project by NP-MICAV (DST-DRDO). He has published several papers in various national and international journals and is working as an Assistant Professor.

Email Id: deepak.vi@ciirc.jyothyit.ac.in

Kashma is currently working as a scientist. Her research interest is on developing sensors for low resource settings using nanotechnology. She has been awarded a fellowship from the Department of Science and Technology in 2018 for fabricating biosensors, under the women scientist scheme. She has entrepreneurial experience, being part of a startup and has attended numerous workshops including a bootcamp conducted by IIMB. Her core background is in Electrical Engineering with a Ph.D. specializing in Electro-Optics from Drexel University, USA. Her dissertation work focused on designing and fabricating thin films, for remote sensing applications. This was a NASA funded project and resulted in a patent. She has significant experimental work experience in thin film fabrication and using multiple electro-optic instruments for characterization. Her multidisciplinary background includes electrical engineering, optics, material science and biotechnology. She has published her work in peer reviewed journals, along with presenting it at various international conferences.

Email Id: kashma.rai@ciirc.jyothyit.ac.in

Prof. N Narasimhaswamy, the ever vibrant Octagenarian is currently the Advisor and Visiting Professor to the Centre. Having worked in many capacities in B.M.S. college of Engineering for 35 years and in E&C Department – KSIT for 4 years and in RVCE for 5 years, he has profound teaching experience spanning nearly 50 years. Presently he is one of the Syndicate members of Tumkur University. He has authored four textbooks for undergraduate students. His hobbies include singing light music and playing mouth organ.

Email Id: narasimha.s@ciirc.jyothyit.ac.in

Jagadeesh is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India. He has over 30 years of Institutional & Industry experience and has been instrumental in the establishment of Product Development Centre (PDC), and Science & Technology Entrepreneurs Park (STEP), SJCE, Mysuru. During his tenure of 11 years, he has established & managed R& D Centre and Calibration Centre, and has trained a team of technicians in various electronic skills – assembly, proto-typing, testing & trouble shooting, design, calibration, etc, developed over 45 products & technologies, some of which were taken up by STEP entrepreneurs for commercialization.  In addition, he has provided consultancy, design & customised testing services to local industries.  He has also developed & conducted a number of Skill Development Programmes at various levels, helping bridge the gap between institutional education & practical industrial needs. Some of these programmes were custom developed for certain industry needs. He was also a faculty at BMS College of Engineering, Bangalore & Singapore Polytechnic, Singapore.  Later he moved to USA & worked as a Senior Research Scientist, R&D Engineer, and Consulting Engineer at companies such as National Bio-medical Research Foundation, Snap-on Diagnostics, Brooks Automation, and others over a period of 8 years. He has served as a Research Scientist, at the Centre for Emerging Technologies and co-ordinated Internships & Projects at the industries for M.Tech Students of Jain University, as well as supports the establishment of laboratories. He is a Life member of professional bodies – Institution of Electronics & Telecommunication Engineers (MIETE), and Indian Society for Technical Education (MISTE) and served as Honorary Secretary for IETE. Jagadeesh is working as a Visiting Professor.

Email Id: jagadeesh.bc@ciirc.jyothyit.ac.in

Keshava Gowtham, currently working as a Research Engineer completed B.E. in Information Science and M.Tech in Computer Networks from VTU and has a overall work experience of close to four years. During this tenure, he has worked extensively on Micro Air vehicles Systems which comprises of various MEMS sensors and ARM based microcontrollers. He has worked extensively on Firmware development for several embedded peripheral protocols like UART, GPIO, EEPROM, DMA, SPI, Timers and I2C and interfacing and data acquisition from MEMS Sensors like Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Magnetometer and Barometric Pressure Sensors using STM32 and AT91SAM7S256 boards. He has also Contributed to the development of Mobile Application to visualize 3D orientation using HMC05 Bluetooth module to communicate between microcontroller board containing MEMS sensors with Android app. The features of the app include measurement and  display of 3D orientations like Roll, Pitch and Yaw from MEMS sensors in a 3D cube form.

Email Id: keshava.gns@ciirc.jyothyit.ac.in

Divakara M. B. is a Postgraduate in Chemistry from Bangalore University. Soon after his M.Sc. he joined Wexford Laboratories Pvt. Ltd. as a Quality Control Officer and gained experience in analyzing organic samples using HPLC. He was awarded the Aquitaine – Karnataka (Indo-French) Short Term Research Fellowship to carry out a part of his research work at IECB, CNRS, Bordeaux, France where he studied the interactions of peptide-membrane systems using Solid-State NMR Spectroscopy. He also has the experience in formulation, synthesis, purification and testing of various Organic Compounds and is capable of handling some of the state of the art instruments such as SEM, XRD, UV, FTIR, GC and others. He was awarded the BIRAC GYTI – SRISTI Award of Appreciation 2017 for the “Development of a Rapid First Aid Solution using a Novel Haemostatic Material”. He is currently working on a DST funded project as a researcher and also pursuing his doctoral degree at the Centre.

Email Id: divakar@ ciirc.jyothyit.ac.in

Bhavana is a Postgraduate in Biochemistry from Kuvempu University. She has the experience of working on drug discovery from natural sources using Saccharomyces cerevisiae Yeast as a model organism when she was a Project Fellow in a UGC sponsored major research project at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Pondicherry Central University, Pondicherry. While at Pondicherry, she gained significant research experience in identifying molecular targets for anti-cancer drugs using Yeast knockout library. She has also worked in a KSCSTE sponsored project that focused on Medicinal Plants and Inflammation Research at School of Biosciences, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, Kerala and has also contributed considerably to various other collaborative projects. She has more than four years of research experience and is currently working as a Project Fellow in an Indo – French project funded by CEFIPRA. Her research interests include Cancer genomics, Biology of Neurodegenerative disorders and Drug discovery.

Email Id: bhavana.v@ciirc.jyothyit.ac.in

Manohar Raju V. is an experienced researcher with a demonstrated history of work in Microbiology & Biotechnology Sectors. He obtained his Master of Science (M.Sc.) degree in Microbiology from Bangalore University. He has the credit of passing the National Eligibility Test (ASRB – UGC CSIR) twice. He began his professional career as a Junior Analyst (Microbiology Division) in a private organization where he carried out analysis on Food, Water and Drugs. Later, he joined the National Bureau of Agricultural Insect Resource (NBAIR-ICAR) as Project Assistant in the Division of Molecular Entomology where he isolated novel strains of Bacillus thuringiensis and subsequently sharpened his skills in various isolation and characterization techniques, including 16S-rRNA analysis, m-PCR, Primer Design, Fermenter, formulations, Bioassay, etc. He has trained a number of Graduates, Post Graduates, Scientists and Entomologists in isolation, characterization and mass culturing techniques of Microbials for the production of Biopesticides. He was one of the main volunteers in Empowering Women Farmers on Biological Control of Plant Diseases organized by ICAR-NBAIR in collaboration with Green Foundation on “Production of Trichoderma species and Pseudomonas fluorescens by Women farmers & Seed savers of Self Help Groups. He has also trained a number of farmers on production of biopesticides using simple agricultural waste and farm yard manure. His research interests are in the area of Astrobiology, Bioterrorism, Exobiology, Forensic Science, Metagenomics, Nanobiotechnology, and Synthetic Biology. He is currently working as a Research Fellow in a DRDO funded project at the Centre.

Email Id: manohar.raj@ciirc.jyothyit.ac.in

Ashwini Ravi is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at CIIRC, Jyothy Institute of Technology affiliated to Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU). She holds a M.Tech in Nanotechnology and a B.Tech in Biotechnology, both from VTU. During her Masters, she worked as an intern at the Department of Material Engineering, Indian Institute of Science and subsequently, continued her work for a year as a Project Assistant after completing her Masters. Later, she moved to the Centre for Biosystems, Science and Engineering, IISc and worked as a Research Assistant for two years where she worked on bioimaging techniques and stem cells based 3D nanofibrous scaffods. She has co-authored 5 research articles in journals of high repute.