Lavanya’s family is full of doctors – her grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. Medicine was the obvious path. But when exam complications forced her to reconsider, she pivoted to biotechnology engineering. Today, in her fifth and final year as a PMRF PhD scholar at IIT Madras’s Bhupat and Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences, she is building something that might help millions of arthritis patients worldwide: a targeted drug delivery system that activates precisely where inflammation occurs.
And it was four months at Rice University, through the Mehta Rice Engineering Scholarship, that transformed her hypothesis from ambiguous to crystallized.
The Path to Research
Growing up in Chennai, Lavanya never imagined herself in research. Engineering was her second choice after medicine. But during her master’s at NIT Trichy, something clicked. She watched professors run labs, saw fellow students leave corporate jobs to return to research, observed her then guide Dr. Bala Subramaniam’s relentless drive to publish, apply for grants, and push boundaries.
“I felt very strongly that this research path is more interesting than a company job,” she recalls. “You get to explore a lot of things. One main thing connects all my projects – different polymers, different applications. In bachelor’s, master’s, and now PhD, I’m working with various materials for different purposes.”
She mapped her entire future: M.Tech, then PhD, then postdoc, eventually a scientist position at the E or C level. At IIT Madras, working under Professor Vignesh Muthuvijayan in biomaterials and tissue engineering, she started turning that vision into reality.
The Struggle of Hypothesis
Lavanya’s lab fabricates artificial tissues – skin, cartilage – testing them in vitro and in animal models to see if they can help regenerate human tissue. Her focus: cartilage tissue regeneration for rheumatoid arthritis, incorporating drug delivery systems that could work systemically rather than just locally.
But her first two years were extremely difficult. She experimented with hydrogels, tested material combinations, and worked toward a thermal-responsive system for localised drug delivery to inflamed joints. The work was methodical but the hypothesis felt incomplete, because rheumatoid arthritis is systemic. It spreads through the body and affects multiple joints simultaneously, and a solution that addresses one joint at a time will always fall short of the disease. What she wanted was systemic treatment with localised precision, and she did not yet know how to build it.
Four Months That Changed Everything
When Lavanya applied for the Mehta Rice Engineering Scholarship in 2023, she had one professor in mind: Kevin McHugh from Rice’s bioengineering department. His work aligned perfectly with her lab’s focus. His positive response to an early email made her hopeful about finding a path ahead.
From September 2023 to February 2024, she worked in McHugh’s lab on peptide-based drug delivery systems. The difference? Structure and intensity of collaboration.
“Within the very first month, we had almost three to four meetings a week with Professor Kevin,” she explains. “Whenever I would come up with an idea, he’d suggest alternatives – why don’t you think this way, why don’t we try that.” They collectively indulged in literature searches, back-and-forth brainstorming sessions, and within a month, were able to come up with a plan.
She was now building a peptide-drug conjugate, a molecule engineered to travel systemically through the bloodstream and locate inflamed joints by binding to collagen type 2, a protein found in concentrated form almost exclusively in joint tissue, releasing its therapeutic payload only when it encounters the acidic pH that inflammation produces. The system was synthesised, characterised, and tested for anti-inflammatory activity in cell lines across those four months.
What emerged was not only a solution for rheumatoid arthritis but a modular architecture, changing the targeting peptide, changed the disease. The same logic could extend to any joint-related inflammatory condition.
Bringing Innovation Home
She returned to IIT Madras with synthesized compounds, characterization data, and, most importantly, a clear path forward. The work she started at Rice became the foundation for extending her PhD research in new directions.
“This internship helped me a lot in my five-year PhD,” she reflects. She went in her second year, when she was struggling to set a proper hypothesis. Since then, she can now confidently say that she can combine both works and finish her PhD with a couple of papers. “It set my PhD in such a way that I knew I could finish in five years.”
Laavanya is now preparing to publish her first PhD paper (currently under review), continues her collaboration with Professor McHugh (they even reconnected at the Controlled Release Society conference in Philadelphia, where she presented orally), and is teaching government school students 3D printing through IIT Madras’s “Teach to Learn” program.
Beyond the Bench
Research can be consuming. Lavanya balances intensity with badminton three to four times per week and recently discovered marathon running, completing 10K races this past February. “You just can’t be doing research all the time. It will break you.”
Her lab of 17-18 people – five PhD students, four postdocs, numerous interns and dual-degree students – provides collaborative environment where she doesn’t just work on her project but helps others, learning techniques across different biomaterials and tissues. “At the end of five years, I shouldn’t know only about my work. I need end-to-end protocols for different approaches.”
The PMRF scholarship she secured through lateral entry in her second year provided crucial funding to extend her hypothesis beyond hydrogels to include the nanoparticle-based delivery system. Combined with Rice’s resources, she could optimize her compounds through multiple iterations.
The Road Ahead
Lavanya plans three years of postdoctoral work before applying for scientist positions or potentially joining an R&D team in industry. Her research on pH-responsive, joint-targeted drug delivery could extend beyond rheumatoid arthritis to any condition involving inflammation of joints or acidic pH microenvironments. Just change the targeting peptide, and the platform adapts.
From medicine dreams to biomaterials innovation, from scattered experiments to crystallized hypothesis, Lavanya’s journey shows how strategic international exposure – at the right moment in a researcher’s trajectory – can transform not just projects but entire careers. Four months of focused collaboration gave her five years of clear direction.
And somewhere in Chennai, a family of doctors is about to welcome their first PhD.
Laavanya D is a fifth-year PMRF PhD scholar at IIT Madras’s Bhupat and Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences, working on targeted drug delivery for rheumatoid arthritis. Her research is developing a treatment system precise enough to find inflammation in the body and spare everything else. Beyond the lab, she plays badminton, runs, and teaches 3D printing to schoolchildren through IIT Madras’s Teach to Learn programme.