Avani Ghate

hello :) i am a senior at UC Berkeley majoring in Molecular and Cell Biology with a minor in Data Science!

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about me

hello! :Di'm Avani Ghate, a senior at the University of California, Berkeley. i am majoring in molecular and cell biology (molecular therapeutics emphasis) with a minor in data science.alongside this, i am an undergraduate researcher at the Rapé Lab, where i am doing my senior thesis.
i was a data science committee member at Women in Computing and Data Science, a marketing intern at Asha for Education, Berkeley, and a project leader at iGEM.additionally, i interned at Parker Hannifin as a Lab Scientist Intern during Summer '24, and at Merck Summer '25 as a Discovery Pharmaceutical Sciences Intern :)in my free time, i enjoy drawing, photography, taking long walks, and trying out new coffee and matcha spots!feel free to email me at [email protected] if you'd like to talk :)

experiences

Rapé Lab 🧫

i am an undergraduate researcher at the Rapé Lab in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. i am doing a senior thesis alongside my postdoc mentor. specifically, i am characterizing the interface between an E3 ubiquitin ligase, SMURF1, and an important metabolic enzyme that is part of the de novo purine biosynthesis pathway.

iGEM @ Berkeley 🧬

i was a member and project leader of iGEM's newest experimental team, Synthetic Therapeutics. i helped create modified E. coli cells with an dual plasmid system which undergoes stochastic expression.i was also a member of iGEM's newest experimental wetlab/compbio team, NavGene. i helped engineer a more thermostable form of the protein IscB-wRNA, an evolutionary precursor to Cas9 with a range of biotechnological applications. we used site-saturation mutagenesis and a toxin-antitoxin system to create a form of this protein that can be used at 37 degrees C in laboratory conditions.

STAC 🔭

i was an Engineering Team Member of the TIME II project at STAC (Space Technologies at Cal). this project tests the effects of microgravity on antibiotics in E. Coli cells.

Women In Computing and Data Science 💻

i was a member of WiCDS' data science committee. through this, i learned various data science-related topics such as visualizations, cleanup, SQL, and feature engineering, and worked on mini-projects based on real-world issues. i developed a Spotify song predictor which used Euclidian distances and linear regression.

Asha for Education, Berkeley 📚

as a marketing intern for Asha, i helped curate graphics and blogs for Asha's social media pages and website.

portfolio

in my free time, i love to draw and write :)
for more of my work, click here.

relevant coursework

Biology 1B: General Biology (FA22)Data C8: Foundations of Data Science (FA22)Math 1A & 1B: Calculus (SP23 and FA23)BIOENG 99: Supervised Independent Study and Research (SP23, FA23, SP24)BIOENG 196: Supervised Independent Study and Research (FA24)BIOENG 199: Supervised Independent Study (SP25)MCB 199: Supervised Independent Study and Research (SP25)Physics 8A & 8B: General Physics (SP23 and FA23)Data C88C: Computational Structures in Data Science (FA23)CS 61B: Data Structures (SP24, audited)CHEM 3A/L and 3B/L: Organic Chemistry (SP24, FA24)MCB c114: Comparative Virology (SP24)Data C100: Principles and Techniques of Data Science (FA24)BIOENG C131: Introduction to Computational Molecular and Cell Biology (FA24)MCB 102: Survey of the Principles of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (SP25)MCB 104: Genetics, Genomics & Cell Biology (SP25)COLWRIT 161: Writing in the Biological Sciences (SP25)BIOENG 115: Tissue Engineering Lab (SP25)MCB 120: Therapeutics Discovery and Development (FA25)MCB 149: The Human Genome (FA25)MCB C146: Data Science for Biology (SP26)UGBA 135: Personal Financial Management (SP26)

contact

feel free to reach out to me!