THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Arjun Raman
Arjun grew up in Houston, TX then attended the University of Chicago for his undergraduate studies where he double majored in Physics and Chemistry. He then went on to pursue a dual-degree Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at UT Southwestern where he joined the laboratory of Rama Ranganathan as a Molecular Biophysics Ph.D. student. His attraction to the Ranganathan lab was the pursuit of understanding principles of protein structure, function, and evolvability. His graduate work was interdisciplinary, spanning statistical genomics, fundamental protein biophysics, and molecular simulation, and culminated in a paper linking the concepts of evolution with the origins of allostery in proteins .
Arjun graduated with his M.D. and Ph.D. in 2017 and went on to pursue his residency in Clinical Pathology at Barnes Jewish Hospital as well as a postdoc in the laboratory of Jeffrey Gordon—the pioneering researcher of the human gut microbiome. There, he deepened his interest in how to study complexity more generally, applying the intuition and statistical frameworks learned from his graduate school studies in protein evolution to attempting to understand the organization of the developing gut microbiome in healthy and undernourished children. This interest ultimately to a series of papers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) that collectively put forth a single idea: the gut microbiome can be understood statistically. From a practical perspective, his work led to the formulation of the first designed therapeutic food that has been trialed for treating malnutrition in children.
Arjun started his laboratory at the University of Chicago in 2020 where his lab sits between the Pathology Department in the medical school, the Duchossois Family Institute, the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and the Center for the Physics of Evolving Systems and studies the complex and emergent properties of natural systems.
