Kiran Bala

I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Yaowen Wu lab at Umeå University. My research focuses on autophagy in positive-stranded RNA virus infections. Positive-stranded RNA viruses are a large group of human pathogens including coronaviruses, picornaviruses, and arthropod-borne flaviviruses and alphaviruses. Autophagy is an evolutionarily conserved catabolic process that maintains cellular homeostasis by eliminating or recycling dysfunctional cellular organelles or unused proteins.

In my project, we are trying to understand how the autophagy machinery is used for replication or restriction of a diverse set of positive-stranded RNA viruses with the goal of discovering new therapeutic targets. For this, I am using novel cell biology methods combined with advanced proteomics and cryo-electron tomography.

Before joining Umeå University, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow in an antiviral development program at the Regional Center for Biotechnology (RCB), Faridabad, India. In this program, we constructed reporter viruses for the development of high-content antiviral screening assays against Chikungunya and Japanese encephalitis virus infection and elucidated the potential and mechanism of action of targeted antiviral drug candidates in vivo and cell culture model systems.

I hold a PhD in Molecular Virology from the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI), Faridabad, India. During my PhD, I studied the interactions between cellular autophagy and innate immune responses during Japanese encephalitis virus infection.

ORCID 0000-0002-2575-4525