Ram Dixit, BS, PhD

Ram Dixit believes that the arts and sciences are fundamentally intertwined human endeavors which are artificially and unhelpfully treated as separate entities by society and our educational institutions. His interest in biology led him to obtain a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry from the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he conducted research on somatic embryogenesis from carrot cell suspension cultures. He then moved upstate to Cornell University where he studied cell-cell communication during plant reproduction and received a Ph.D. in plant molecular biology in 2000. During his Ph.D. work, Ram got interested in the inner workings of cells that produce shape and execute various cellular functions. He did postdoctoral work at Penn State University where he used fluorescence microscopy and computational modeling to characterize the dynamics and organization of plant cortical microtubules. He then joined Dr. Erika Holzbaur’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania to study molecular motor proteins and microtubule tip-binding proteins using single-molecule imaging and functional reconstitution experiments. Ram joined the Biology Department at Washington University in St. Louis as an Assistant Professor in 2008 and is currently a Full Professor of Biology. He serves as faculty director of the BioSURF program at Washington University, as co-director of the Plant and Microbial Biosciences graduate program, and as associate director of education for the NSF-funded Science and Technology Center for Engineering Biology. In Cellular Transformations, Ram wants to explore how biology, design and construction can be combined to inspire new types of human-made structures.

Dixit Lab Website