Principal Investigator
Ananya leads the lab. Ask her about haemoglobin at your own risk.
Ananya Rao is Professor of Structural Biology at the Deccan Institute of Science, where she leads a group of twenty researchers who study how proteins work, move and fail.
Her group solved the first structures of a family of oxygen-sensing proteins and built the cryo-EM facility that now serves forty labs across India. Before starting her lab she was a postdoctoral fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, and she received her PhD from the Indian Institute of Science.
Professional & Research Experience
- 2022 – present
Professor of Structural Biology, Deccan Institute of Science
- 2015 – 2022
Associate Professor, Deccan Institute of Science
- 2012 – 2015
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Cambridge
Education
- 2012
PhD in Molecular Biophysics, Indian Institute of Science
Thesis: Allostery in haemoglobin variants by X-ray crystallography
- 2007
MSc in Biochemistry, University of Hyderabad
Awards & Honours
- 2026
Swarnajayanti Fellowship, National Research Foundation
- 2024
Fellow, Academy of Sciences
- 2018
Young Scientist Medal, National Science Academy
Service & Leadership
- 2023 – present
Associate Editor, Journal of Structural Biology
- 2024 – present
Director, National Cryo-EM Facility, Deccan Institute of Science
Invited Talks
- 2026
Proteins in motion, Gordon Research Conference on Three Dimensional Electron Microscopy
- 2025
What AlphaFold cannot see, International Conference on Structural Biology