Sweta Vangaveti

Sweta Vangaveti is a research scientist at the RNA Institute. Her work is currently focused on using in silico molecular modeling and simulations to study the structure and dynamics of nucleic acids. She received her PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from Iowa State University in 2014, where her project involved developing coarse-grained models to study electrostatics in phospholipid bilayers. As a post-doc at the RNA Institute (2015-2017), she used molecular dynamics simulations to understand the effects of modified nucleotides in tRNA-mRNA interactions, and also developed a coarse-grained model for nucleic acids, to analyze and interpret results from Ion-mobility Mass Spectrometry (IMS-MS) experiments. In her second post-doc, in Dr. Zhiping Weng’s lab at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (2017-2019), her work included improving the in-house protein-protein docking software ZDOCK and assisting in re-designing and maintaining the ZDOCK web-server. She likes working in a collaborative environment, and her research interests include the structural and functional effects of modified nucleotides, the various aspects of translational control and modeling methods to study RNA-protein interactions. When not glued to the computer, she likes to spend her time cooking or dabbling with her camera.

Lab Website: SV Lab