Shamitha is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Biomedical Engineering department at Pratt, where she is pursuing research on developing nanomaterial immunotherapies for treating chronic inflammation in the Collier Lab. Upon graduation, she plans to work in the biotech industry in a search and evaluation role or in life sciences consulting. Prior to graduate school, Shamitha worked at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health where she developed vaccine candidates for treating infectious diseases such as SARS-CoV-2, Malaria, HIV and Flu. Additionally, she gained big-pharma experience at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) where she worked as a Process Informatics Associate for supporting GSK’s clinical and commercial GMP manufacturing facilities after receiving her Master’s degree in Biotechnology from Penn State University.