About us > Our Team

Sharmila Banerjee-Basu, PH.D

Sharmila Banerjee-Basu earned her undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Presidency College, Calcutta and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Maryland, where her thesis work focused on understanding the structure and functional properties of antimicrobial peptides, nisin and subtilin produced by food-grade lactic acid bacteria. Her postdoctoral work began at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, where she studied the role of transcription factors in gene regulation in mammalian context. As a staff scientist with the National Human Genome Research Institute, she used a variety of bioinformatics approaches to understand the evolution and function of homeodomain proteins that controls a cell’s fate in embryonic development, and how mutations in these proteins contribute to human disease.

Ajay Kumar

Ajay Kumar joined MindSpec in September 2009 after graduating with his MS in Neuroscience from the State University of New York at Buffalo. There his thesis work focused on the role of oxidative stress in sensitizing neuronal cells to damage. In graduate school he participated in the Autism Consortium. Mr. Kumar holds a BS in Biology from George Mason University.

Yong Luo

Yong Luo earned his PhD degree in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from George Mason University. He also holds an MS in Computer and Information Sciences from Cleveland State University, and became a Sun certified JAVA programmer. He is experienced in developing algorithms and programming in C/C++, JAVA, Unix Shell, SQL.

Jogarao Vedula

Jogarao Vedula joined MindSpec after graduating with a BS in Neuroscience and Physiology, and BA in Finance.

Rachna Wadhawan

Rachna Wadhawan comes to MindSpec with over 5 years of experience in Java-J2EE technologies, JNDI, JDBC, DataSource, XML, Mysql, Sybase, Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) for building server side applications and user interfaces using applets.

Catherine Croft Swanwick

Catherine Swanwick earned her BS in Biology from Duke University and her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Virginia. She conducted five years of postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health before joining the MindSpec team. Her laboratory research focused on the formation and regulation of synapses in the hippocampus, a brain region important for learning and memory. She has published seven research articles, two commentaries, and one book chapter.

Sue Spence

Sue Spence provides administrative support to all scientific activities at MindSpec including research and development of new projects. She spent over twenty-five years in a local law office as an administrative legal assistant, where she gained extensive knowledge in the areas of litigation, estate and trusts and real estate.