Ekta Foster-Lachmandas
PHILIPSBURG--Ekta Foster-Lachmandas, a graduate of St Dominic High School’s Class of 2008, successfully defended her PhD thesis before the Faculty of Medical Sciences of Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen on November 15.
The title of her dissertation was “Host response to tuberculosis: impact of diabetes and cellular metabolism of immune cells.”
Radboud University Medical Centre Media Relations Office said in its summary of Foster-Lachmandas’ thesis that she “has examined host responses to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, integrating immunology and cellular metabolism, in the laboratory of the Experimental Internal Medicine of Radboudumc and the A-star institute in Singapore.
“Part of her work specifically focused on diabetes, a very important risk factor for tuberculosis, as part of the EU-funded TANDEM consortium which combines clinical-epidemiological and more basic research in Peru, South Africa, Romania and Indonesia to tackle the problem of combined TB [tuberculosis – Ed.] and diabetes (www.tandem-fp7.eu).”
After graduating from St. Dominic High School, Foster-Lachmandas began her tertiary education at HAN University of Applied Sciences in Nijmegen, majoring in Life Sciences. As part of her studies, she completed an internship at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. While there she began her research and was invited to continue in the Netherlands at Radboud Universiteit. She is recently married and currently resides in Zurich, Switzerland.
