Tarun Bansal, a graduate student in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, has been recognized by the American Society of Microbiology (ASM) for his research.

Bansal, who is advised by Assistant Professor Arul Jayaraman and Professor Thomas Wood, has been named a recipient of a travel grant that will enable him to present his research at the ASM annual meeting, scheduled to be held in Philadelphia in May.

In addition, Bansal is one of only six students selected from a pool of 700 total presenters to give an oral presentation at the annual meeting as part of the Richard and Mary Finkelstein Student Award Presentation portion of the event.

“At the ASM meeting, there are very few oral presentations given, and Tarun is the only non-biologist in the group who was asked to do this; it speaks to the quality of his work,” Jayaraman said.

Bansal’s abstract is titled “Inter-kingdom Signaling: A Molecular Framework for Host-Pathogen Interactions.” His project seeks to understand how molecules present in the human gastrointestinal tract are involved in bacterial infections. He has shown that human cells can sense bacterial molecules, and bacteria can, in turn, sense and respond to human molecules.

Last year, Bansal was awarded the Paul and Ellen Deisler Fellowship in Chemical Engineering on the basis of his scholarly productivity and excellence in graduate studies. The fellowship was endowed in 2000 by the Deislers as a means of promoting advanced studies in chemical engineering.

Written by: Ryan Garcia at ryan.garcia99@tamu.edu

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