Ram Dixit

Ram Dixit

Principal Investigator, Professor and Chair of Biology

Ram Dixit obtained a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry from the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he conducted research in Dr. Abraham Krikorian’s lab on somatic embryogenesis from carrot cell suspension cultures. He then moved upstate to Dr. June Nasrallah’s lab at Cornell University, where he studied cell-cell communication during plant reproduction and received a Ph.D. in plant molecular biology. 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 in Dr. Richard Cyr’s lab 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 became Full Professor of Biology in 2020.