Udit is in his 4th year of Ph.D. programme at Indian Institute of Technology Mandi. Broadly, he is working on different structural regions in Zika virus capsid protein in context of interaction with host cell, amyloid formation and cellular localization. He has been awarded ICMR-SRF in the year 2019 and SERB-OVDF in the year 2020 for continuing his research in India and at Purdue University, USA. He has earned his master’s degree (M.E) in Biotechnology from Birla Institute of Technology & Science Pilani, Rajasthan in the year 2017. He completed his bachelor’s degree (B.tech) with honors in Biotechnology from Sharda University, Delhi-NCR in the year 2014.

Taniya Bhardwaj is a DST-INSPIRE Ph.D. research scholar in IIT Mandi. She joined Giri lab in 2018 and is presently working on flaviviruses and their protein-protein interactions. Her work focuses on intrinsically disordered nature of flavivirus proteins and their molecular recognition patterns involved in interactions with viral and host proteins. Recently, she also started working on coronavirus and has successfully collaborated with all other lab members. She was a gold medalist in her master’s degree (Genetics) and graduated from University of Mysore in 2017. She earned her bachelor’s education from Hindu College, University of Delhi in Zoology honors in 2015. She enjoys solo travelling, trekking, reading and wall painting.

K Shivani Krishna is a Ph.D. scholar and her research broadly focuses on investigating protein conformational dynamics, structure-based drug discovery, and viral protein aggregation of flavivirus, coronavirus and cellular proteins. Her work specifically involves gaining mechanistic insights into biophysics, protein-protein, and protein-lipid interactions of ZIKV NS1 protein.  She did her M.Sc. Biotechnology from Madurai Kamaraj University & BSc from Mount Carmel College, Bangalore.

Prateek Kumar is a Ph.D. Scholar and currently exploring computational aspects of protein structure, folding, and dynamics using multiscale simulations. He has earned his master's degree in Bioinformatics from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He did his bachelors (B.Sc.) in Zoology from University of Delhi, New Delhi. In 2018, he joined Giri lab as Bioinformatician and started working on structure-based drug discovery on viral (Zika virus, Chikungunya virus) proteins. He, currently, works on different system of proteins to study their folding/unfolding behavior, disordered property, and structure-based inhibitor designing. His ongoing research on mentioned topics comprises several approaches such as Molecular dynamics simulation (including replica exchange and all atom MD), virtual screening, protein-protein interaction analysis, etc. He has collaborated with his lab members to work on viral systems including flavivirus and coronavirus. His work is also based on understanding the protein dynamics in different environment, modulation upon interaction with lipids, and identification of inhibitors against specified targets. In past two years, he has worked on these questions using computational simulations which are found to be in good correlation with the experimental observations.