Dr Swathi Suran

Swathi received her Bachelors and Masters in Biomedical Engineering in 2008 and 2010 from Mumbai University and Manipal University respectively. She then joined the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore as a Research Assistant for a period of 1.5 years, during which she was part of different projects based on MEMS, microfluidics and optical biosensors. During this time she also got an opportunity for an internship at Purdue University where she was further able to explore her interest in material/device fabrication. In 2012 she joined as a PhD student at the Centre for Nanoscience and Engineering, IISc with Prof. Manoj Varma wherein she developed an optical imaging technique called the Bright-field Nanoscopy (BFN). This also happens to be her thesis title! BFN allows one to visualise or identify sparsely populated nanostructures with significantly high optical contrast simply by using an ordinary optical microscope. After her PhD, she continued to work with the same group as a Research Associate until 2018. Over the years, Swathi has gathered a diverse background from biomedical instrumentation to cleanroom device fabrication and characterisation. After being awarded the Newton International Fellowship by the Royal Society for the proposed work on graphene capillaries for filtration, she moved to the University of Manchester in February 2019. In September 2019, she joined the 2D Health team in the Theme I project led by Prof. Rahul Nair. She will be focusing on the bio-filtration and anti-microbial activity of graphene membranes.