Dr Shwathy Ramesan
PhD
Biography
Dr Shwathy Ramesan is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Myelin in Health and Disease group at The Florey. With a strong background in biomedical engineering, she has worked in a range of research projects, which involves synergistic skills from both fields. She obtained her PhD from RMIT University in Chemical and Biomedical Engineering.
Dr Ramesan’s overall research interests lie in inventing in vitro platforms to understand complex disease progressions. During her PhD, she used high frequency sound waves to optimise drug delivery in various in vitro and ex vivo model systems. She also developed an in vitro hydrogel based platform to study the developmental biology of craniofacial osteogenesis. This platform provides a broadly applicable model system to potentially study diseases involving embryonic craniofacial bone disorders, where direct diagnosis and adequate animal disease models are limited. This led to inventing various platforms to understand disease progression and biology.
Currently, Dr Ramesan is working on creating in vitro human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) based organoids to model Multiple Sclerosis. The goal is to understand the fundamental biology of the disorder and aid in drug testing.
Career highlights
Current roles
- Research Fellow – The Florey
Past roles
- 2023 – Secretary at the Florey Post-doctoral Committee, The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental health
- 2020 – Mentor at BrainSTEM, a program which engages high school students to participate in real world STEM Innovation and Research with the guidance of a mentor
- 2018 – Mentor at Smith Family – Mentor to help kids from disadvantaged families including refugees and non-English speaking background people with schoolwork
Awards and achievements
- 2023 – Best Oral presentation award (ECR category) in the Progress in MS Research by MS Australia held in Perth, Australia
- 2023 – Opportunity to present both at the Scientific talks and community engagement talk at MS Australia held in Perth, Australia
- 2023 – Committee and co-founding member of Melbourne Emerging Leaders in Biomedical Research, a society which encourages cross-collaboration between interdisciplinary research across Melbourne
- 2022 – Recipient of the travel grant given by Glia Conference to attend the conference in Berlin, Germany
- 2022 – Speaker at Soapbox Science Melbourne
- 2019 – Winner of RMIT Prize for Research Excellence for innovative Technology, RMIT University
- 2019 – Winner of the best oral presentation as an Early Career Research in the Biomedical and Health Innovation Enabling Capability Platform, RMIT University
- 2019 – Selected as an ECR to attend the Australian Technology Network (ATN) connect, collaborate, and commercialise research translation workshop.
- 2019 – Winner of Fresh Science, Victoria, representing RMIT University at the national level for innovative research discovery
- 2018 – Winner of Pro Vice-Chancellor Prize for the best Higher Degree by Research for exceptional PhD research, RMIT University
- 2018 – Winner of Maxwell Eagle Endowment Award for Cancer research, RMIT University
- 2018 – Selected and was sponsored for the Graeme Clark oration and the Women in STEMM Conference and Networking event
- 2017 – Winner of three-minute (3 M) Thesis presentation in the School of Engineering, RMIT University and represented School of Engineering at the University finals
- 2016 – Recipient of publication award for publishing in high quality, high impact factor journals at RMIT University
- 2015 – Certificate of Achievement in recognition of the Outstanding Good Teaching Scale (GTS) of 91.4% with 100% Overall Satisfaction (OSI) in 2015 and 95.8% in 2016 for tutoring Fluid Flow and Particle Mechanics (PROC2079) for three consecutive years
- 2014 – RMIT Postgraduate International Scholarship, RMIT University.
- 2013 – Recipient of Scholarship to carry out 6-month internship at Harvard-MIT Medical School, Massachusetts, USA on Stem cells Research.